scholarly journals Autistic children do not exhibit an own-race advantage as compared to typically developing children

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 1544-1551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarina Hui-Lin Chien ◽  
Liang-Huei Wang ◽  
Chien-Chung Chen ◽  
Tzu-Yun Chen ◽  
Hsin-Shui Chen
Keyword(s):  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children

scholarly journals The Tilt Model Acoustic Survey of Intonation in Children with Severe Autism

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Shahla Sharifi ◽  
Zahra Azizi ◽  
Mandana Nourbakhsh
Keyword(s):  
Acoustic Survey ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Speech Pattern ◽  
Severe Autism ◽  
Tilt Model

<p>The purpose of this study is an acoustic survey of intonation in a set of declarative and interrogative sentences as uttered by 15 children with severe autism (SA) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing (TD) children. The results indicate that monotony is not a common feature in the speech pattern of all autistic children. More specifically, the results demonstrate that the monotony attributed to the autistic children’s production of speech cannot be attributable to all kinds of sentences they produce as they can produce statements and questions fairly similar to typically developing children.</p>

scholarly journals Accounting for motion in fMRI: What part of the spectrum are we characterizing in autism spectrum disorder?

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Beth Nebel ◽  
Daniel Lidstone ◽  
Liwei Wang ◽  
David Benkeser ◽  
Stewart H Mostofsky ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Intellectual Ability ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
The Impact

The exclusion of high-motion participants can reduce the impact of motion in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. However, the exclusion of high-motion participants may change the distribution of clinically relevant variables in the study sample, and the resulting sample may not be representative of the population. Our goals are two-fold: 1) to document the biases introduced by common motion exclusion practices in functional connectivity research and 2) to introduce a framework to address these biases by treating excluded scans as a missing data problem. We use a study of autism spectrum disorder to illustrate the problem and the potential solution. We aggregated data from 545 children (8-13 years old) who participated in resting-state fMRI studies at Kennedy Krieger Institute (173 autistic and 372 typically developing) between 2007 and 2020. We found that autistic children were more likely to be excluded than typically developing children, with 29.1% and 16.1% of autistic and typically developing children excluded, respectively, using a lenient criterion and 80.8% and 59.8% with a stricter criterion. The resulting sample of autistic children with usable data tended to be older, have milder social deficits, better motor control, and higher intellectual ability than the original sample. These measures were also related to functional connectivity strength among children with usable data. This suggests that the generalizability of previous studies reporting naïve analyses (i.e., based only on participants with usable data) may be limited by the selection of older children with less severe clinical profiles because these children are better able to remain still during an rs-fMRI scan. We adapt doubly robust targeted minimum loss based estimation with an ensemble of machine learning algorithms to address these data losses and the resulting biases. The proposed approach selects more edges that differ in functional connectivity between autistic and typically developing children than the naïve approach, supporting this as a promising solution to improve the study of heterogeneous populations in which motion is common.

scholarly journals Using Technology to Identify Children With Autism Through Motor Abnormalities

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Simeoli ◽  
Nicola Milano ◽  
Angelo Rega ◽  
Davide Marocco
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Task ◽  
Neurodevelopmental Disorder ◽  
Children With Autism ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Motor Patterns ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Tablet Device ◽  
Motor Abnormalities

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder typically assessed and diagnosed through observational analysis of behavior. Assessment exclusively based on behavioral observation sessions requires a lot of time for the diagnosis. In recent years, there is a growing need to make assessment processes more motivating and capable to provide objective measures of the disorder. New evidence showed that motor abnormalities may underpin the disorder and provide a computational marker to enhance assessment and diagnostic processes. Thus, a measure of motor patterns could provide a means to assess young children with autism and a new starting point for rehabilitation treatments. In this study, we propose to use a software tool that through a smart tablet device and touch screen sensor technologies could be able to capture detailed information about children’s motor patterns. We compared movement trajectories of autistic children and typically developing children, with the aim to identify autism motor signatures analyzing their coordinates of movements. We used a smart tablet device to record coordinates of dragging movements carried out by 60 children (30 autistic children and 30 typically developing children) during a cognitive task. Machine learning analysis of children’s motor patterns identified autism with 93% accuracy, demonstrating that autism can be computationally identified. The analysis of the features that most affect the prediction reveals and describes the differences between the groups, confirming that motor abnormalities are a core feature of autism.

scholarly journals From Ice Age to Madagascar: Appreciation of slapstick humor in children with Asperger's syndrome

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth M. Weiss ◽  
Bianca C. Gschaidbauer ◽  
Andrea C. Samson ◽  
Krista Steinbäcker ◽  
Andreas Fink ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorders ◽  
Asperger's Syndrome ◽  
Asperger’S Syndrome ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Healthy Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Spectrum Disorders

AbstractThe aim of the present study was to examine whether children with Asperger's syndrome differ from typically developing children in the appreciation of and behavioral responses to simple slapstick type humor, in which cognitive requirements that are commonly impaired in autism spectrum disorders are reduced to a minimum. Short slapstick scenes and matched non-humorous control scenes were extracted from popular movies to produce an appropriate humor assessment material. Twenty-four boys with Asperger's syndrome (5 to 14 years) and 24 age-matched typically developed controls were tested. The results indicated that children with Asperger's syndrome enjoy humorous material as much as healthy children do, if the humor elements are simple and the incongruence can be perceived independently from theory of mind requirements, inferential demands, or language abilities. However, similar funniness ratings and behavioral expressions of mirth to the humorous scenes, but relatively higher values in response to the non-humorous scenes, suggested that the autistic children did not discriminate non-humorous from humorous stimuli as sensitively as the typically developing children did. Moreover, in autistic children, the outwards displays of emotion did not match their reports of subjective amusement. This dissociation may relate to the social interaction and communication difficulties in autism spectrum disorders.

scholarly journals Bilingualism effects on the cognitive flexibility of autistic children: Evidence from verbal dual-task paradigms

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-73
Author(s):  
Eleni Peristeri ◽  
Margreet Vogelzang ◽  
Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
Keyword(s):  
Executive Functions ◽  
Cognitive Flexibility ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Dual Task ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Target Information ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Language Abilities ◽  
Dual Tasks

Abstract The deficit in cognitive flexibility, i.e. the ability to adapt cognitive behavior to changing contexts, is one of the most prominent characteristics of autistic individuals. Inflexibility may manifest in restricted interests and increased susceptibility to the effects of misinformation either through inefficient inhibition of non-target information or deficient recall of correct information. Bilingualism has been shown to enhance executive functions in both typically-developing children and autistic children, yet, the effect of bilingualism on cognitive flexibility in autism remains underexplored. In this study, we used verbal dual-tasks to compare cognitive flexibility across 50 monolingual autistic and 50 bilingual autistic children, and 50 monolingual and 50 bilingual typically-developing children. The children were also administered language ability tests and a nonverbal global-local cognitive flexibility task, in order to investigate whether performance in the dual-tasks would be modulated by the children’s language and executive function skills. The bilingual autistic children outperformed their monolingual autistic peers in the dual tasks. The strength of the bilingualism effect, however, was modulated by the type of language processing that interfered with the target information in each dual-task, which suggests that the bilingual autistic children calibrated their processing resources and efficiently adapted them to the changing demands of the dual-task only to the extent that the task did not exceed their language abilities. Bilingual autistic children relied on their executive functions rather than on their language abilities while performing in the dual-tasks. The overall results show that bilingualism compensates for the reduced cognitive flexibility in autism.

THE SENSE OF EMPOWERMENT AMONG PARENTS OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Anna Banasiak
Keyword(s):  
Down Syndrome ◽  
Children With Autism ◽  
Demographic Variables ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Statistical Tools ◽  
Mothers And Fathers ◽  
Children With Down Syndrome ◽  
The Relationship

The aim of this study was to examine the level of a sense of empowerment among mothers and fathers of children with autism. The relationship between a sense of empowerment and socio-demographic variables characterising the respondents including the parents was also analysed. Among the participants, there were 74 parents of autistic children (39 mothers, 35 fathers), 77 parents of children with Down syndrome (40 mothers, 37 fathers) as well as 80 parents of typically developing children (40 mothers, 40 fathers). Two statistical tools, namely the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test, were employed in this study. The results show a higher level of a sense of empowerment when it comes to the evaluation of own knowledge and competences in mothers of autistic children than in mothers of children with Down syndrome, contrary to fathers of autistic children whose level of a sense of empowerment is lower within the said scope compared with fathers of children with Down syndrome.

scholarly journals Comparison of three different eye-tracking tasks for distinguishing autistic from typically developing children and autistic symptom severity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Kou ◽  
Jiao Le ◽  
Meina Fu ◽  
Chunmei Lan ◽  
Zhuo Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trial ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Biological Motion ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Social Stimuli ◽  
Visual Preference ◽  
Geometric Patterns ◽  
Social Affect

AbstractAltered patterns of visual social attention preference detected using eye-tracking and a variety of different paradigms are increasingly proposed as sensitive biomarkers for autism spectrum disorder. However, few eye tracking studies have compared the relative efficacy of different paradigms to discriminate between autistic compared with typically developing children and their sensitivity to specific symptoms. To target this issue, the current study used three common eye tracking protocols contrasting social versus non-social stimuli in young (2-7 years old) Chinese autistic (n = 35) and typically developing (n = 34) children matched for age and gender. Protocols included dancing people vs. dynamic geometrical images, biological motion (dynamic light point walking human or cat) vs. non-biological motion (scrambled controls) and child playing with toy vs. toy alone. Although all three paradigms differentiated autistic and typically developing children, the dancing people versus dynamic geometry pattern paradigm was the most effective, with autistic children showing marked reductions in visual preference for dancing people and correspondingly increased one for geometric patterns. Furthermore, this altered visual preference in autistic children was correlated with the ADOS social affect score and had the highest discrimination accuracy. Our results therefore indicate that decreased visual preference for dynamic social stimuli may be the most effective visual attention-based paradigm for use as a biomarker for autism in Chinese children. Clinical trial ID: NCT03286621 (clinicaltrials.gov); Clinical trial name: Development of Eye-tracking Based Markers for Autism in Young Children.Lay summaryEye-tracking measures may be useful in aiding diagnosis and treatment of autism, although it is unclear which specific tasks are optimal. Here we compare the ability of three different social eye-gaze tasks to discriminate between autistic and typically developing young Chinese children and their sensitivity to specific autistic symptoms. Our results show that a dynamic task comparing visual preference for social (individuals dancing) versus geometric patterns is the most effective both for diagnosing autism and sensitivity to its social affect symptoms.

scholarly journals Visual motion prediction and verbal false memory performance in autistic children

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Furtuna Tewolde ◽  
Dorothy Vera Margaret Bishop ◽  
Catherine Manning
Keyword(s):  
False Memory ◽  
Visual Motion ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Contextual Processing ◽  
The Relationship

Recent theoretical accounts propose that atypical predictive processing can explain the diverse cognitive and behavioural features associated with autism, and that difficulties in making predictions may be related to reduced contextual processing. In this pre-registered study, thirty autistic children aged 6-14 years and thirty typically developing children matched in age and non-verbal IQ completed visual extrapolation and false memory tasks to assess predictive abilities and contextual processing, respectively. In the visual extrapolation tasks, children were asked to predict when an occluded car would reach the end of a road and when an occluded set of lights would fill up a grid. Autistic children made predictions that were just as precise as those made by typically developing children, across a range of occlusion durations. In the false memory task, autistic and typically developing children did not differ significantly in their discrimination between items presented in a list and semantically related, non-presented items, although the data were insensitive, suggesting the need for larger samples. Our findings help to refine theoretical accounts by challenging the notion that autism is caused by pervasively disordered prediction abilities. Further studies will be required to assess the relationship between predictive processing and context use in autism, and to establish the conditions under which predictive processing may be impaired.

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