shared attention

Clinical research: Study suggests four autism subgroups

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:58:00 -0700

Clinical research: Study suggests four autism subgroups:

Diagnosis of autism is based on a core set of symptoms in each of three domains — social interest, language ability and repetitive behaviors — and differences among individuals with the disorder are often considered a question of degree. But the vast diversity of genetic profiles that appear to underlie the disorder often prompts researchers to call it ‘the autisms,’ emphasizing the disorder’s heterogeneity.

In a 2010 study, researchers took thorough medical histories for 252 individuals with autism and performed a statistical analysis to see if certain symptoms are more likely than others to occur together². They identified four categories: sensory problems, immune system issues, neurodevelopmental delay and repetitive behaviors.

In the new study, the same researchers reanalyzed the data from all 252 participants to see whether they are more likely to have symptoms that fall into one category and not the others. The participants cluster into four discrete groups, the study found: those with immune abnormalities, along with sleep disruption and sensory sensitivity, but with little developmental delay; those with sleep and sensory deficits, but no immune abnormalities; those with pronounced repetitive behavior; and those who have a combination of all symptoms described in the other three groups and more severe developmental delay.

Presuming Competence

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:39:00 -0700

Presuming Competence :

“Because my parents presumed my competence, they included me in the family, they believed I was able to understand what I already knew I could: anything a girl my age would.”

Please click through to read Amy Sequenzia’s full post here.

Cognition and behavior: Language defect identified in autism

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:25:00 -0700

Cognition and behavior: Language defect identified in autism:

From SFARI:

To better understand the interaction between autism, intellectual disability and language, researchers in the new study compared the language ability of 36 children with both autism and intellectual disability, 26 children with intellectual disability only and 34 typically developing controls. Children were matched on the basis of mental age, independent of language ability. The mean age for children with autism was about 7 years; those with intellectual disability were about 6.5 years old and controls were about 3 years old.

The researchers used a number of measures to rate expressive language, or speaking ability, and receptive language, the ability to understand the speech of others, in each of the children. These measures included both direct tests and parental-report questionnaires.

Overall, children with autism and intellectual disability have lower scores in receptive language than do those with intellectual disability alone, who themselves score lower than controls. There is no statistically significant difference in expressive language between children with autism and intellectual disability compared with children with intellectual disability alone; but, again, both groups score lower than controls.

This suggests that, overall, children with autism have stronger expressive than receptive language skills, whereas this trend is reversed in the other two groups. Specifically, about 34 percent of children with autism and intellectual disability have better expressive compared with receptive language, the study found. By contrast, 54 percent of children with intellectual disability only and 44 percent of controls have better receptive than expressive language.

The researchers also looked at whether the children’s ability to engage the attention of others, called joint attention, and their understanding of symbols was related to their language ability. These two factors account for 81 percent of the variation in receptive language scores and 72 percent of the variation in expressive language scores among the children with autism, the study found. For example, children with autism who have more difficulty with joint attention have lower language scores than those with better joint attention ability.

Fascinating; this highlights the important role of shared or joint attention in the acquisition and functional use of language, both expressive and receptive and supports our assertion that it should be the foundation for assessment and intervention.

Read the rest here.

Can’t wait for more submissions to this blog for people...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 11:47:17 -0800

Can’t wait for more submissions to this blog for people with SPD.

Training parents is good medicine for children with autism behavior problems, study suggests

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 07:30:06 -0800

Training parents is good medicine for children with autism behavior problems, study suggests:

From Science Daily:

The children in the study were randomly assigned to medication alone for six months or medication plus a structured training program for their parents for six months. Parent training included regular visits to the clinic to teach parents how to respond to behavior problems to help children adapt to daily living situations. The study medication, risperidone, is approved for the treatment of serious behavioral problems in children with autism.

“In a previous report from this trial, we showed that the combined treatment was superior to medication alone in reducing the serious behavioral problems,” said Scahill. “In the current report, we show that combination treatment was better than medication alone on measures of adaptive behavior. We note that both groups — medication alone and combined treatment group — demonstrated improvement in functional communication and social interaction. But the combined group showed greater improvement on several measures of everyday adaptive functioning.”

TED Talks: Daniel Wolpert Pretty sure Daniel Wolpert is my new...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 09:56:00 -0800

TED Talks: Daniel Wolpert

Pretty sure Daniel Wolpert is my new science hero. A neuroscientist and self-proclaimed movement chauvinist, his research attempts to decipher how the brain directs movement:

“Research areas include motor planning and optimal control, probabilistic (Bayesian) models, motor predictive and modular approaches to motor learning.”

As he posits in this TED Talk, the brain evolved exclusively to control movement, so studying brain functions, such as executive functioning, is futile without also considering how those functions might influence and be influenced by sensory/motor processing.

This equation is absolutely brilliant, and so beautifully illustrates one of the primary differences we see in kids with sensory processing challenges: without well-integrated, well-coordinated information from the senses, children don’t develop the same richly varied database of information about how things work, including, sometimes, their own bodies. Instead, these intelligent kids compensate by depending on their memory, rather than dynamic in-the-moment processing, which typically presents as rigidity, inflexibility, or “stereotyped” behaviors. Though I’m reluctant to make such a dehumanizing comparison, there’s an analogy to the “brain” of a supercomputer, which is able to maintain a large database of static “rules” to guide specific actions, but flounders when challenged to generalize those rules to a novel variation.

These children are not, of course, automatons, but are using their own best-available strategy to solve the problem of feeling a sense of mastery and control over their own experiences. Unfortunately, this strategy is often insufficient to the demands of moving though an inherently unpredictable and variable world. And so, in the kind of work we do, we typically aim to support the child to develop a more robust and varied database by following their interests, engineering the activity and interaction from the inside to enhance their processing and scaffold their success.

IQ, Intelligence, and Underestimation

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 17:12:00 -0800

Here are two articles, both from Science Daily, describing research that demonstrates how poorly standardized tests predict academic ability in kids with autism and Aspergers.

IQ Scores Fail to Predict Academic Performance in Children With Autism

New data show that many children with autism spectrum disorders have greater academic abilities than previously thought. In a study by researchers at the University of Washington, 90 percent of high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders showed a discrepancy between their IQ score and their performance on reading, spelling and math tests.

(…)

Little is known about how these children actually perform in regular classrooms, which has implications for how to assign support services. Since IQ scores in the general population reliably predict academic performance — as measured by standardized tests for word reading, spelling and basic number skills — Estes and her colleagues thought the same would be true in their sample of 30 high-functioning 9 year olds with autism spectrum disorders.

“What we found was astounding: 27 out of the 30 children — that’s 90 percent — had discrepancies between their IQ score and scores on at least one of the academic achievement tests,” Estes said. “Some scored higher and some scored lower than what their IQ score would predict.”

To the researchers’ surprise, 18 of the 30 children tested higher than predicted on at least one of the academic tests. This was especially true for spelling and word reading. Across the three academic tests, 18 of the 30 children scored lower than what their IQs would predict, suggesting a learning disability.”

These findings shouldn’t be so surprising, given how dependent IQ tests are on receptive and expressive language and, no matter what inter-rater reliability claims can be made, on a positive rapport between tester and student.

The researchers also didn’t compare IQ and achievement test scores with actual school participation or performance, which would provide a valuable dimension to this picture, especially since they noted a positive correlation between social skills and academic performance. Shared or joint attention is a foundation for both social interactions and the ability to learn implicitly through observation of others.

Read the whole article here.

Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence: What About Asperger Syndrome?

(…) Both autistic and Asperger individuals display uneven profiles of performance in commonly used intelligence test batteries such as Wechsler scales, and their strongest performances are often considered evidence for deficits.

However, this study reports that Asperger individuals’ scores are much higher when they are evaluated by a test called Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which encompasses reasoning, novel problem-solving abilities, and high-level abstraction. By comparison, scores for non-Asperger individuals are much more consistent across different tests. Interestingly, Asperger participants’ performance on Raven’s Matrices was associated with their strongest peaks of performance on Wechsler.

(…)

According to co-author Michelle Dawson, “while we know autistics process information atypically, very little thought has gone into how to fairly assess their abilities. In fact there is so little understanding of what autistics do well that their strong abilities are often regarded as dysfunctional. Here we have again found that measurable strengths in autistic spectrum individuals are not “isolated islets of abilities” as previously thought, but are in fact representative of autistics’ intellectual abilities. This in turn raises questions about how we can provide autistics with the kinds of information they can process well, as we do with non-autistic individuals. We consider the effort to understand and encourage autistic strengths to be of paramount importance. “

Based on these results, the authors emphasize that autistic spectrum intelligence is atypical, but also genuine, general, and underestimated.

Again, these findings should not be so surprising, but really highlight the need to look at the individual differences of each child (i.e. unique strengths and challenges) rather than trying to create a better academic mold in which to stuff all children.

Augmented play helps children with autism

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:57:00 -0800

Augmented play helps children with autism:

From Science Daily:

“Making play sets more interactive and giving children with autism greater opportunities to control and add content of their own to the game could improve cooperative play with other children as well as giving them greater confidence in understanding how objects interact.

William Farr and Nicola Yuill of the University of Sussex, UK and Steve Hinske of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, explain that children with autism are often affected not only by social difficulties, but also have an impaired understanding of the way objects interact. They have investigated how toys, such as the “Augmented Knight’s Castle” (AKC) might be adapted to be more beneficial to those children and perhaps even act as a therapeutic tool.

Writing in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, the team,from the Children and Technology Lab at the University of Sussex explains how they have examined childhood playexplains how they have examined childhood play with the popular Playmobil Knight’s Castle play set, which as the name would suggest comprises a toy castle with various obvious components of towers, parapets, a moat and the various model people that can be used in imaginative play to enact various roles within the play set.

The team has thus augmented the play set by adding a wireless networking system and radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) to the components to add feedback and programmable aspects to the play set. The play set might thus produce sound or movement given certain actions by the child playing with the toys. Their tests with autistic children volunteered to play with the AKC reveal promising results that are allowing the team to conclude that such adapted play sets can improve understanding and interest in the play set itself, but more importantly boost the level of interaction with other children playing with the toys. Indeed, the team noticed more parallel and cooperative play and less solitary play with the fully configurable setup for the AKC. They add that autistic children playing with the configurable AKC were also more inclined to actively play with the Playmobil figures.”

This is an interesting concept. I can almost imagine how adding some multi-sensory feedback mechanisms might encourage or even enhance the kind of exploratory play that develops a strong and varied database of object affordances (i.e. cause/effect relationship between an object and its potential purpose), but as an OT and toy connoisseur, I can’t help but feel a bit skeptical, since there already exists a world of readily available toys that can be used in the context of supported play.

What the researchers are attempting to address is agency: the implict knowledge that one’s purposeful actions have the ability to influence or impact on their environment. (This is, in essence, a primary focus of our approach.) However, I can’t help but think that the researchers have re-invented an unnecessarily complex wheel.

To illustrate my point, I’m pretty sure we have the Playmobil castle floating around the office somewhere; it’s a really fantastic toy for the very few children we see who have good constructional praxis, executive functioning to sustain attention and organize many detailed pieces, fine motor coordination to assemble the toy, fine motor control to manipulate the toy, and emotional regulation to manage the inevitable frustration of mistakes and pieces falling apart.

As an alternative, we might select the Imaginext castle, which also affords a wide range of imaginative ideas, but has pieces that are larger, more distinctly detailed, and moving parts that are more specific in their purpose. For kids with mild challenges, this provides an appropriate level of challenge while still allowing them to feel successful enough to move from exploratory play to representational and symbolic ideas.

To further reduce the motor demands, we might choose the Fisher Price Little People (I strongly prefer the vintage version), again, providing toys that provide the developmentally appropriate level of motor challenge to allow the child to demonstrate their ideas.

It’s also just as likely that we might transform a playhouse into a castle, provide foam swords and stuffed dragons… you get the idea.

First of all, I’m highly skeptical about the efficacy of prescribing a particular toy to facilitate the development of a sense of agency; by definition, this must be driven by the child’s own innate interests, ideas, and motivation. It seems to me that it would be more effective to consider the child’s natural interests, then match the toy or activity to the child’s individual differences, i.e. their capacity for visual spatial processing, fine motor control and coordination… and then to consider what kind of support might be provided to facilitate their ability to express their ideas, rather than evaluating their ability to play with a toy “appropriately.”

Read the full article here.

pbsparents: This kid has 99 problems, and counting to 99 is one...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:23:26 -0800

pbsparents:

This kid has 99 problems, and counting to 99 is one of them.

I’ve heard of “First World Problems” but “First Grade Problems??” I’m ~~intrigued~~ obsessed. It’s like, sometimes we grow up so fast, we forget how hard it really is to be a 6 year old.

Six to nine-month-olds understand the meaning of many spoken words

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:33:38 -0800

Six to nine-month-olds understand the meaning of many spoken words

Hearing metaphors activates brain regions involved in sensory experience

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:10:00 -0800

Hearing metaphors activates brain regions involved in sensory experience:

From Science Daily:

Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work ‘Metaphors we live by’, pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like “rough day”) that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.

New brain imaging research reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard.

Embodied cognition strikes again! I find this interesting, as it is commonly believed that individuals with autism and Asperger’s have difficulty processing metaphors. Could we trace this, too, back to a lack of effective connectivity between the senses? For those individuals who lack a rich and nuanced sensory database for the visual, auditory, and tactile senses associated with a label, such as “rough,” is it any wonder that the word might lack in rich and nuanced meaning?

Read the full article here.

Edited to clarify, with apologies: it is certainly not my intention to over-generalize. In my experience, there are as many variations of autism as there are individuals who have the diagnosis. There, are, however, some patterns of differences that cause significant functional challenges, confusion, and frustration for the children I work with. This research sparked my interest and caused me to speculate about receptive processing of language and a possible connection to sensory integration because it would suggest an alternative to the typical rote method of teaching.

Nap-deprived tots may be missing out on more than sleep

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:59:26 -0800

Nap-deprived tots may be missing out on more than sleep:

From Science Daily:

The study shows toddlers between 2 and a half and 3 years old who miss only a single daily nap show more anxiety, less joy and interest and a poorer understanding of how to solve problems, said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Monique LeBourgeois, who led the study. The results indicate insufficient sleep alters the facial expressions of toddlers — exciting events are responded to less positively and frustrating events are responded to more negatively, she said.
“Many young children today are not getting enough sleep, and for toddlers, daytime naps are one way of making sure their ‘sleep tanks’ are set to full each day,” she said. “This study shows insufficient sleep in the form of missing a nap taxes the way toddlers express different feelings, and, over time, may shape their developing emotional brains and put them at risk for lifelong, mood-related problems.”

This assertion is perfectly intuitive to parents and professionals who work with toddlers, but researchers manufactured the circumstances to observe this phenomenon for themselves:

In the study, the toddlers’ faces were videotaped while they performed “kid-friendly” picture puzzles, including those of farm animals, sea creatures and insects. One puzzle each child worked had all of the correct pieces, which gave him or her the opportunity to experience and express positive emotion, she said. A second puzzle had a “wrong” piece and therefore was frustrating to the toddlers in the study because it was unsolvable.

Facial expressions of the toddlers were coded on a second-by-second basis for emotions like joy, interest, excitement, sadness, anger, anxiety, disgust, shame and confusion.

The study showed nap-deprived toddlers completing the solvable puzzles had a 34 percent decrease in positive emotional responses compared to the same children completing similar puzzles after their usual midday naps. The study also showed a 31 percent increase in negative emotional responses of nap-deprived toddlers when they attempted to complete unsolvable puzzles when compared with puzzle-solving attempts after they had napped.

In addition, the study found a 39 percent decrease in the expression of “confusion” when nap-deprived toddlers attempted to put together unsolvable puzzles. “Confusion is not bad — it’s a complex emotion showing a child knows something does not add up,” said LeBourgeois. “When well-slept toddlers experience confusion, they are more likely to elicit help from others, which is a positive, adaptive response indicating they are cognitively engaged with their world.”
(…)
“A sleepy child in a classroom or daycare environment may not be able to engage with others and benefit from positive interactions,” she said. “Their coping skills decrease and they may be more prone to tantrums or frustration, which would affect how other children and adults interact with them. This study shows that missing even a single nap causes them to be less positive, more negative and have decreased cognitive engagement.”

They’re currently recruiting families for a study to determine the potential impact on cognitive ability and executive function.

With the high frequency of sleep disturbances in kids with autism and sensory processing disorders, this suggests another layer of complexity to consider in our assessment and intervention.

Read the article here.

Are the anxious oblivious?

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:05:53 -0800

Are the anxious oblivious?:

From Science Daily:

Anxious people have long been classified as “hypersensitive” — they’re thought to be more fearful and feel threatened more easily than their counterparts. But new research from Tel Aviv University shows that the anxious may not be hypersensitive at all — in fact, they may not be sensitive enough.
As part of a study on how the brain processes fear in anxious and non-anxious individuals, Tahl Frenkel, a Ph.D. candidate in TAU’s School of Psychological Sciences and the Adler Center for Research in Child Developmental and Psychopathology, working with her supervisor Prof. Yair Bar-Haim, measured brain activity as study participants were shown images designed to induce fear and anxiety. Using an EEG to measure electrical activity caused by the neuronal activity that represents deep processing of these stimuli, the researchers discovered that the anxious group was actually less stimulated by the images than the non-anxious group.

Surprisingly, anxious study participants weren’t shown to be as physiologically sensitive to subtle changes in their environment as less fearful individuals, Frenkel explains. She theorizes that anxious people could have a deficit in their threat evaluation capabilities — necessary for effective decision-making and fear regulation — leading to an under-reaction to subtle threatening stimuli. Non-anxious individuals seem to have a subconscious “early warning system,” allowing them to prepare for evolving threats. Essentially, anxious people are “surprised” by fearful stimuli that non-anxious individuals have already subconsciously noticed, analyzed, and evaluated.

This supports our frequent observation of anxiety in children with poorly integrated sensory processing, who tend to selectively attend to one mode of sensation (typically vision) to the exclusion of the conflicting or incongruous input. They lack the kind of flexible shifting of attention that would allow them to alert and orient to the subtle environmental cues that would otherwise help them anticipate changes, transitions, and other events with enough time to generate a purposeful response. Instead, they tend to react with a fight/flight response and often make attempts to avoid this kind of ambiguity by adhering to predictable routines and controlling the actions of others with their own emotions and behavior.

When confronted with a potential threat, Frenkel concluded, non-anxious people unconsciously notice subtle changes in the environment before they consciously recognize the threat. Lacking such preparation, anxious individuals often react more strongly, as the threat takes them more “by surprise.”

“The EEG results tell us that what looks like hypersensitivity on a behavioral level is in fact the anxious person’s attempt to compensate for a deficit in the sensitivity of their perception,” she explains.

Read the article here.

To children (but not adults) a rose by any other name is still a rose

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 07:30:06 -0800

To children (but not adults) a rose by any other name is still a rose:

From Science Daily:

Two vital parts of mentally organizing the world are classification, or the understanding that similar things belong in the same category; and induction, an educated guess about a thing’s properties if it’s in a certain category. There are reasons to believe that language greatly assists adults in both kinds of tasks. But how do young children use language to make sense of the things around them? It’s a longstanding debate among psychologists.

A new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the predominant answer. “For the last 30 to 40 years it has been believed that even for very young children, labels are category markets, as they are for adults,” explains psychologist Vladimir M. Sloutsky, who authored the paper with Ohio State University colleague Wei Deng. According to this theory, if you show anyone an oblong, scaled, limbless swimming thing and say it’s a dog (its label), both adults and children will believe it’s a dog (in that category of four-legged domesticated mammals) and should behave like a dog — bark or wag its tail.

The study confirms that many adults do use labels this way. But children do not. “Our research suggests that very early in development labels are no different from other features,” says Sloutsky. “And the more salient features may completely overrule the label.” You insist the swimming thing is a dog. The child weighs all the evidence — and “dog” is no more important than scales or swimming — and concludes it’s a fish.

To test their hypothesis, the psychologists showed pictures of two imaginary creatures to preschoolers and college undergraduates. Both animals had a body, hands, feet, antennae, and a head. The “flurp” was distinguished by a pink head that moved up and down; the “jalet” had a blue sideways-moving head. The heads were salient — the only moving part. During training, the subjects learned what a flurp or a jalet looked like.

Then the experimenters changed some of the features, keeping the head consistent with most of them, and asked participants to supply the missing label. They also showed creatures with characteristics and a name, and the subjects had to predict — induce — the missing part. Both adults and children did best when the head was consistent with the name.

The difference arose when the head was a jalet’s but label was “flurp,” or vice-versa. Then, most of the adults went with the label (we accept that a dolphin is a mammal, even though it looks and swims like a fish). The children relied on the head for identification. Regardless of its name, a thing with a jalet’s head is a jalet.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it seems to call into further question the rote skill-and-drill-flashcard-style learning utilized in behavioral models of intervention. If, developmentally, children are processing the sensory, motor, and affective attributes and affordances of an object in order to learn how to classify it, this would be best facilitated in the context of guided, hands-on exploration with a supportive adult. The study’s authors agree:

Sloutsky says the findings could inform teaching and communicating with children. “If saying something is a dog does not communicate what it is any more than saying it is brown, then labeling it is necessary but by no means sufficient for a child to understand.” Talking with young children, “we need to do more than just label things.”

The second reason I find this interesting is more speculative; I have often wondered whether many of the hallmark symptoms of autism and the secondary deficits observed in sensory processing disorder, such as language delay and alleged theory of mind differences might be traced back to poorly integrated processing (i.e. rather than thinking of these as primary deficits, that they are the result of piecemeal processing and the resulting spotty connectivity between sensory memory stores). For example, in this case, if a child is taking in the visual shape of the duck, but not forming pathways that connect and integrate that information with the texture of the feathers, the quack, or the characteristic waddle, flap, and swimming motions of a duck, how much more challenging would it be for them to acquire the functional, working hypothesis of “duckness” required to label a novel creature with the label, “duck?”

Read the full article here.

The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:30:06 -0800

The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood:

From the New York Times:

“In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. Children have lost the clumsiness of toddlerhood and can become physically gymnastic, too, and start practicing their fine motor skills. And because they are still smaller than adults, they can grow adept at a skill like, say, spear-tossing, without fear of threatening the resident men.

Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.

The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.”

Thanks to Sara, for bringing this to our attention.

The curious case of the reversed pronoun

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:11:00 -0800

From Jon Brock’s Cracking the Enigma research blog, an unpacking of the phenomenon of reversed pronouns in children with and without autism.

“You made a circle”, exclaimed Ethan, looking up from his drawing.

“You did make a circle”, his mum acknowledged, ignoring the fact that, not for the first time, Ethan had reversed the pronoun, saying “you” when he should have said “I”.

Ethan was one of six children from Providence, Rhode Island taking part in a study of child language development. Every couple of weeks, a researcher from Brown University would visit him and his mum at home, record, and then transcribe their conversations in painstaking detail. The transcriptions would show that Ethan was a prolific reverser of pronouns; frequently saying “you” when he meant “I” and “your” instead of “my” or “mine”. This curious habit began as soon as pronouns entered his vocabulary and he was still reversing pronouns when, just before his third birthday, the study came to an end.
Ethan’s language skills were otherwise exceptionally good. When assessed at 18 months, his scores put him in the top 1% for children his age. However, some years after the study finished, it transpired that Ethan had Asperger syndrome.

(…)
Say it again
Kanner’s explanation for pronoun reversal in autism came from another observation - that children with autism often repeat entire phrases verbatim, inappropriately and out of context. This so-called ‘echolalia’ would lead to reversals as the pronouns are repeated exactly as heard. British child psychiatrist, Michael Rutter gave the example of a hungry child requesting a biscuit by echoing the phrase “Do you want a biscuit?” The pronoun was reversed but the biscuit was obtained.

Consistent with this explanation, Evans and Demuth noted that Ethan was indeed most likely to reverse pronouns when imitating an utterance that somebody else had previously made. “Dad gave me that ring”, for example, was clearly a reversal but was almost certainly something his mum had said previously.

Case closed one might think.

However, even using the most generous criteria, imitations accounted for less than half of Ethan’s recorded reversals. What’s more, in contrast to the child in Rutter’s example, he actually made relatively few reversals during requests. For example, when asking for his bottle, he said “I want bottle”, using “I” correctly (even though the sentence wasn’t fully formed).

An alternative perspective

Further analyses revealed two final clues. First, as well as using “you” to refer to himself, Ethan occasionally used “I” to refer to other people (something Naima very rarely did). Second, reversed pronouns were more likely to occur in sentences that contained multiple pronouns. For example, at aged 22 months, Ethan was recorded saying “I got you out” when he should have said “You got me out”.

These observations suggest that his problem lay, not in understanding the principles of which pronoun to use, but in applying those principles during a conversation. His difficulties were pragmatic rather than conceptual. More precisely, Evans and Demuth propose that Ethan’s pronoun reversal reflected difficulty in referential perspective taking - in choosing the right word given who was being referred to at any given moment in the conversation.

This account of Ethan’s pronoun reversal fits nicely with research suggesting that autistic children have difficulty with other linguistic terms that depend on the speaker’s perspective.

In an intriguing study published last year, Peter Hobson and colleagues at University College London (Hobson et al. 2010) found that children with autism were competent at using “here” and “there” to refer to locations near or far from themselves. However, the same children struggled to follow similar instructions given by two other people – a task that required them to consider the speaker’s perspective to work out which locations “here” and “there” referred to.

(…)

Wrapping up

Ethan’s pronoun reversal is particularly intriguing in the light of his Asperger syndrome diagnosis. However, it would be unwise to assume that he is representative of all individuals on the autism spectrum. His difficulties do not seem to be explicable in terms of either a lack of relevant linguistic experience or a tendency to echo phrases verbatim, but these may still be contributory factors, and could well explain pronoun reversal in other autistic individuals. Indeed, as noted earlier, Ethan’s error patterns are quite different to some other examples in the autism literature.

Perhaps then the reason pronoun reversal is so common in autism is that there are multiple factors associated with autism that each contribute to difficulties producing and understanding pronouns. Working out why autistic children reverse pronouns may involve looking at the evidence on a case-by-case basis.

I find this research incredibly fascinating, since it’s such a ubiquitous part of communicating with children with autism and, so often, represents a primary concern (and cause of frustration) for their parents. In my anecdotal experience, even the most diligent of corrective measures typically fails to produce lasting change. Instead, the child often begins to self-correct, quite spontaneously, and this seems to coincide with the point in development in which they begin to develop a differentiated sense of self, specifically, a sense of agency and ability to act and impact on the world.

It’s well worth clicking through to read the post in it’s entirety, do so here.

Should the World of Toys Be Gender-Free?

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 07:30:06 -0800

Should the World of Toys Be Gender-Free?:

This is from a New York Times Op-Ed piece from Peggy Orenstein:

Among the “10 characteristics for Lego” described in 1963 by a son of the founder was that it was “for girls and for boys,” as Bloomberg Businessweek reported. But the new Friends collection, Lego says, was based on months of anthropological research revealing that — gasp! — the sexes play differently.

While as toddlers they interact similarly with the company’s Duplo blocks, by preschool girls prefer playthings that are pretty, exude “harmony” and allow them to tell a story. They may enjoy building, but they favor role play. So it’s bye-bye Bionicles, hello princesses. In order to be gender-fair, today’s executives insist, they have to be gender-specific.

As any developmental psychologist will tell you, those observations are, to a degree, correct. Toy choice among young children is the Big Kahuna of sex differences, one of the largest across the life span. It transcends not only culture but species: in two separate studies of primates, in 2002 and 2008, researchers found that males gravitated toward stereotypically masculine toys (like cars and balls) while females went ape for dolls. Both sexes, incidentally, appreciated stuffed animals and books.

Human boys and girls not only tend to play differently from one another — with girls typically clustering in pairs or trios, chatting together more than boys and playing more cooperatively — but, when given a choice, usually prefer hanging with their own kind.

Every experience, every interaction, every activity — when they laugh, cry, learn, play — strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others, and the younger the child the greater the effect. Consider: boys from more egalitarian homes are more nurturing toward babies. Meanwhile, in a study of more than 5,000 3-year-olds, girls with older brothers had stronger spatial skills than both girls and boys with older sisters.

Score one for Lego, right? Not so fast. Preschoolers may be the self-appointed chiefs of the gender police, eager to enforce and embrace the most rigid views. Yet, according Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” that’s also the age when their brains are most malleable, most open to influence on the abilities and roles that traditionally go with their sex.

Traditionally, toys were intended to communicate parental values and expectations, to train children for their future adult roles. Today’s boys and girls will eventually be one another’s professional peers, employers, employees, romantic partners, co-parents. How can they develop skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasize, reinforce, or even create, gender differences? What do girls learn about who they should be from Lego kits with beauty parlors or the flood of “girl friendly” science kits that run the gamut from “beauty spa lab” to “perfume factory”?

At issue, then, is not nature or nurture but how nurture becomes nature: the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them. So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on kids’ potential than parents imagine. And promoting, without forcing, cross-sex friendships as well as a breadth of play styles may be more beneficial. There is even evidence that children who have opposite-sex friendships during their early years have healthier romantic relationships as teenagers.

While I think there’s merit in advocating for more gender-neutral marketing and packaging of toys (I have more than once ranted to anyone who will listen about how Scientific American magazine can be found only on the “Men’s Interest” rack at SeaTac airport), as someone who has an interest in both toys and development, I’m less concerned with the specific traits of the object and more interested in helping children explore the full range of emotional themes and developing ideas with creativity and complexity. Certainly there are toys that more readily afford this, but toys are only the medium through which a child expresses their own ideas and emotional life. I’ve witnessed (and been) a pink-clad princess who fights off mean witches and defeats crocodiles and observed a tender moment between superheroes. The limitation is not in the toys or in the child, but in the expectation of them.

Sewing Audio to Video, and Rubber Hands Onto People

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:48:00 -0800

From Discover Magazine’s Mind & Brain blogs, Carl Zimmer summarizes research that highlights how the brain uses multi-sensory processing to construct perception.

The whole article is worth reading, but I was especially drawn to the opening paragraph, in which the author describes the mundane incident that inspired him to write about it. He uses the anecdote to elucidate how our auditory and visual senses are co-dependent, but by coincidence, it’s the same analogy I often employ to help parents understand how poorly integrated sensory processing impacts on their child’s ability to stay emotionally regulated and to make sense of the world around them:

“I don’t usually stream Netflix onto my television to probe the  inner workings of my mind, but it had that effect not long ago.  While I was catching an old episode ofLaw & Order: Criminal Intent, the actors’ voices lagged a fraction of a second behind the movement  of their mouths, making me so disoriented it completely ruined the show. Soon my irritation turned to puzzlement, and some self-observation allowed me to track my frustration to a precise source. I didn’t care that the ominous soundtrack rose half a second late when Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe crept into the subway tunnel where they  were about to find a body. I didn’t care that the show’s trademark duh-dung! sound marking a new scene was still duh-dung-ing after the scene started. It was only when people talked that I went batty. I would watch the characters speak, and then I’d switch to listening to them, and then I’d watch them speak again. I just couldn’t meld the two streams of information in my head.”

I use this example because the response is so universal… the mere suggestion usually inspires reflexive cringing and groaning. I suspect that the emotional response we experience is akin to motion sickness- hypothesized to be a protective “sit down and reassess” mechanism to resolve the potentially dangerous mismatch between your vision and your vestibular system. It’s as if our brains are telling us, “something’s not right.”

“We don’t mix up our senses willy-nilly, however. There is a window of less than a tenth of a second in which a stimulus from one sense can affect the others. As my misadventure with Netflix showed, my brain was accustomed to balancing sight and sound to make sense of what people were saying without my even noticing, but the sound lag during that episode of Law and Order was so wide that the two sensory streams created confusion instead.”

The important distinction, however, is that we, with relatively intact processing systems, have the history, the memory of a prior experience in which (in this case) Law and Order proceeds in its usual, well-sychronized way. Comparing his present experience to a memory of a previous, similar event, the author’s emotional response of disorientation and confusion was able to give way to the more intellectual response of “irritation” and “puzzlement.” By contrast, children with poorly integrated auditory/visual processing lack a strong database of prior experience typically selectively attend to the stronger or more salient sense, missing the supplemental input that would allow them to perceive the full spectrum of the event. This has significant implications for their ability to attend to events in the environment, including social interactions and opportunities for incidental learning.

The article goes on to describe several illusions which illustrate how the individual modalities conspire to create a new, unified perception, the most famous of which is the McGurk Effect, in which observing sound being articulated influences the processing of the auditory information (i.e. if you see “ga” and hear “ba”, you percieve “da”). Given the high degree of influence, is it any wonder that these children tend to acquire language less efficiently?

The second aspect of multi-sensory processing explored here is how our proproceptive and tactile body scheme senses are influenced by the other senses:

“Sight and sound are not the only senses we mingle in our brains. What we touch can affect what we see or hear. Our very understanding of the shape of our own body can be informed not just directly, through our eyes, but also by the pressure of our feet on the ground, the stretch of ligaments in our shoulders, and the wiggle of balance-sensing nerve hairs in our inner ears. Together, our senses let us control our bodies, keeping us from falling over every time we stand up.

“But this much integration comes with an astonishing ability to be duped. In 1998 Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen, two psychologists then at the University of Pittsburgh, found they could make people feel as if a rubber hand were really their own. All they had to do was put a rubber hand in front of their subjects and have them put their real hand behind a screen. The scientists simultaneously began to stroke the real hand and the fake one with paintbrushes. In a matter of seconds, people reported that the rubber hand felt as if it were part of their own body and that they even felt it being stroked.”

Again, these illusions wonderfully bring to light the normally invisible process of integration, but what about out-of-synch sensory systems? The analogy I often invoke to help parents understand body awareness is driving, or more specifically, parking. Having recently retired the 1997 Buick I inherited from my grandmother for a much more compact and responsive car, this phenomenon was fresh in my mind… My mind had created a mental “map” of the dimensions of the car that allowed me to navigate through space and had been calibrated to calculate the relative responsiveness of the steering wheel, brakes, suspension, etc. to do this accurately. Though the new car is unquestionably easier to park and drive, it took weeks to adjust my driving to match the new car’s body map. It took weeks for this process to turn from a conscious, effortful process to an automatic one. For a child with poor body awareness and postural control, I suspect that moving about in the environment is akin to attempting to parallel park an 18-wheeler when you’re accustomed to driving a subcompact. Physically, it’s difficult to master the mechanical maneuverings required to feel successful, and emotionally, well… stressful seems a woefully inadequate descriptor. Add to this challenge a visual perceptual processing deficit, and suddenly, it’s as if you’re attempting to do this with fogged mirrors and windows…

“The tricks we use to integrate our senses take time to develop. As children grow up, they get better and better at combining sights and sounds. When scientists compare children of the same age, they discover a fascinating pattern: The ones who are better at combining sights and sounds tend to score higher on intelligence tests. It’s possible, some scientists suggest, that helping children combine their senses through training exercises will enable them to do better in school. ”

And so, this is what we do; we help to calibrate our interactions with the child to help them attend with greater consistency and efficiency and provide the multi-modal input that helps their processing system mature.

Read the full article, with links to great videos, here.

What's Behind A Temper Tantrum? Scientists Deconstruct The Screams

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:33:52 -0800

This is so great! From NPR’s Shankar Vedantam reports on research by Michael Potegal and James A. Green into the “natural phenomenon” of tantrums.

Now research suggests that, beneath all the screams and kicking and shouting, lies a phenomenon that is entirely amenable to scientific dissection. Tantrums turn out to have a pattern and rhythm to them. Once understood, researchers say, this pattern can help parents, teachers and even hapless bystanders respond more effectively to temper tantrums — and help clinicians tell the difference between ordinary tantrums, which are a normal part of a child’s development, and those that may be warning signals of an underlying disorder.

The key to a new theory of tantrums lies in a detailed analysis of the sounds that toddlers make during tantrums. In a new paper published in the journal Emotion, scientists found that different toddler sounds – or “vocalizations” – emerge and fade in a definite rhythm in the course of a tantrum.

(…)

“We developed a onesie that toddlers can wear that has a high-quality wireless microphone sewn into it,” Green said. “Parents put this onesie on the child and press a go button.”

The wireless microphone fed into a recorder that ran for several hours. If the toddler had a meltdown during that period, the researchers obtained a high-quality audio recording. Over time, Green and Potegal said they collected more than a hundred tantrums in high-fidelity audio.

The scientists then analyzed the audio. They found that different tantrum sounds had very distinct audio signatures. When the sounds were laid down on a graph, the researchers found that different sounds emerged and faded in a definite pattern. Unsurprisingly, sounds like yelling and screaming usually came together.

“Screaming and yelling and kicking often go together,” Potegal said. “Throwing things and pulling and pushing things tend to go together. Combinations of crying, whining, falling to the floor and seeking comfort — and these also hang together.”

But where one age-old theory of tantrums might suggest that meltdowns begin in anger (yells and screams) and end in sadness (cries and whimpers), Potegal found that the two emotions were more deeply intertwined.

“The impression that tantrums have two stages is incorrect,” Potegal said. “In fact, the anger and the sadness are more or less simultaneous.”

Green and Potegal found that sad sounds tended to occur throughout tantrums. Superimposed on them were sharp peaks of yelling and screaming: anger.

It seems to me that this is really powerful information to share with parents. It’s so difficult, in the moment, to shift from our own experience of what’s happening to take in the child’s perspective… the complex emotions of anger and sorrow that are represented in the tantrum.

Based on their research, they offer the following recommendations:

The trick in getting a tantrum to end as soon as possible, Potegal said, was to get the child past the peaks of anger. Once the child was past being angry, what was left was sadness, and sad children reach out for comfort. The quickest way past the anger, the scientists said, was to do nothing. Of course, that isn’t easy for parents or caregivers to do.

“When I’m advising people about anger, I say, ‘There’s an anger trap,”’ Potegal said.

Even asking questions can prolong the anger — and the tantrum.

This really resonates with our approach to managing tantrums and behavior:

Maintain a calm demeanor, convey with your affect (face, body, and vocal tones) that “you’re safe” and “everything will be okay.”
Avoid adding any additional information into the already overwhelmed system by attempting to use logic, asking questions, or using too many words… in this state the child is probably not able to process complex concepts like “frustrated.” (This is true, even for adults- there’s no faster way to escalate my own anger than to tell me that I’m angry!)
Take action only to keep the child safe
Wait… and look for opportunities to make yourself available to share attention with the sadness and provide comfort, even when you’re the inadvertent cause of the tantrum

“You know, when children are at the peak of anger and they’re screaming and they’re kicking, probably asking questions might prolong that period of anger,” said Green. “It’s difficult for them to process information. And to respond to a question that the parent is asking them may be just adding more information into the system than they can really cope with.”

(…)

“Tantrums tend to often have this flow where the buildup is often quite quick to a peak of anger,” Green said.

Understanding that tantrums have a rhythm can not only help parents know when to intervene, but also give them a sense of control, Green said.

That’s because, when looked at scientifically, tantrums are no different than thunderstorms or other natural phenomena. Studying them as scientific subjects rather than experiencing them like parents can cause the tantrums to stop feeling traumatic and even become interesting.

Read it and listen to the story here.

Happiness is All the Rage: SMELLS LIKE HOLIDAY SPIRIT

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:50:53 -0800

Happiness is All the Rage: SMELLS LIKE HOLIDAY SPIRIT:

loverly:

I’m hosting a toy and warm clothing drive to benefit Treehouse for Kids here in Seattle. I could really use your help! Learn more (and thank you in advance for dealing with my babble):

I’ll admit it. I really love this time of year. I’m smitten with twinkle lights and reading by the fire and…