Autism Research Snippets

[mainly for my own reference]

[autismscience]

Classic finding about newborn baby's imitation skills is probably wrong.

A new study in Current Biology, more methodologically rigorous than any previous investigation of its kind, has found no evidence to support the idea that newborn babies can imitate. Autism-relevant.

[autismscience]

Having an autistic partner makes a romantic relationship more satisfying for autistic adults? (Questionnaire.)

Of 229 autistic adults (age 18-58, 137 women & 92 men), only 17 (7%) "reported that they had no desire at all to be in a relationship"

[autismscience]

Molecular Autism is a peer-reviewed, online open access journal that publishes high-quality basic, translational and clinical research that has relevance to the etiology, pathobiology, or treatment of autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions. Research that includes integration across levels is encouraged. Molecular Autism publishes empirical studies, reviews, and brief communications.

Results indicate that ‘minimally verbal’ or ‘nonverbal’ school-aged autistic children may be at risk of being underestimated: they may be wrongly regarded as having little cognitive potential. Our findings support the usefulness of strength-informed approaches to autism and have important implications for the assessment and education of autistic children.

[autismscience]

Existence of a considerable and well-defined group of extremely talented people within the autism spectrum.

Of the 1108 children with ASD in this study, 467 (42%) had one or more savant skills. This prevalence is significantly higher than the observed 31% of savant skills among children with ASD that did not undergo CNV analysis in the SSC cohort (P<0.001). It is also higher than the typically 10%-30% reported prevalence of savant skills among children with ASD in other studies. Similarly to other reports, savant skills in our study were associated with a higher IQ (93.0±24.2 vs. 79.1±25.5; P<0.001) among children with ASD.  

[autismscience]

Autistic children successfully apply analogical reasoning to social information.

Autism spectrum disorder participants exhibited performance that was well above chance and was not significantly worse than age- and intelligence quotient–matched typically developing children. 

Evidence that children with autism spectrum disorder can apply analogical reasoning ability to social content may have long-range applied implications for exploring how this capacity might be channeled to improve social cognition in daily life.

[autismscience]

Positive & negative experiences of 325 autistic mothers vs 91 typical mothers (online survey).

Mothers with autism and mothers of children with autism were equally likely to have had contact with social services in the UK, with similar outcomes. Disturbingly, approximately 1 in 5 mothers of a child with autism, regardless of maternal diagnosis, were assessed by social services; of those, 1 in 6 had their child compulsorily placed for adoption. Finally, rates of allegations and investigations of suspected fabricated illness amongst children with autism and their siblings were two orders of magnitude higher than the known incidence the UK.

[autismscience]

Concern about publication bias in ABA single case design research.

The published literature often underrepresents studies that do not find evidence for a treatment effect; this is often called publication bias. Literature reviews that fail to include such studies may overestimate the size of an effect. Only a few studies have examined publication bias in single-case design (SCD) research, but those studies suggest that publication bias may occur. This study surveyed SCD researchers about publication preferences in response to simulated SCD results that show a range of small to large effects. Results suggest that SCD researchers are more likely to submit manuscripts that show large effects for publication and are more likely to recommend acceptance of manuscripts that show large effects when they act as a reviewer. A nontrivial minority of SCD researchers (4% to 15%) would drop 1 or 2 cases from the study if the effect size is small and then submit for publication. This article ends with a discussion of implications for publication practices in SCD research.

[autismscience]

Idiosyncratic perceptual transformations & atypical category learning in autism (self-organizing map simulations).

“Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) sometimes have difficulties learning categories. Past computational work suggests that such deficits may result from atypical representations in cortical maps. Here we use neural networks to show that idiosyncratic transformations of inputs can result in the formation of feature maps that impair category learning for some inputs, but not for other closely related inputs. These simulations suggest that large inter- and intra-individual variations in learning capacities shown by children with ASD across similar categorization tasks may similarly result from idiosyncratic perceptual encoding that is resistant to experience-dependent changes. If so, then both feedback- and exposure-based category learning should lead to heterogeneous, stimulus-dependent deficits in children with ASD.”

[autismscience]

Fast response to human voices in autism

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are reported to allocate less spontaneous attention to voices. Here, we investigated how vocal sounds are processed in ASD adults, when those sounds are attended.

Results showed that, similar to neurotypical (NT) adults, ASD adults were faster to recognize voices compared to strings. Surprisingly, ASD adults had even shorter RTs for voices than the NT adults, suggesting a faster voice recognition process.

These observations indicate that the previously observed attentional deficit to voices in ASD individuals could be due to a failure to combine acoustic features, even though such features may be well represented at a sensory level.