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.

From Science Daily:

This comes as no surprise, but highlights the importance of early social referencing and monitoring to develop emerging perspective taking and theory of mind. 

“Understanding other people is a key factor in successful communication, and humans start to understand this at a very young age,” said Yuyan Luo, associate professor of developmental psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science. “Our study indicates that infants, even before they can verbally communicate, can understand the thought processes of other people — even if the thoughts diverge from what the infants know as truth, a term psychologists call false belief.”

During the study, infants were monitored during different trials of a common psychological test in which an actor indicated preference for certain objects. Researchers timed the infant’s gaze, which is an indication of infant knowledge. The infants watched longer when the actor’s preferences changed. This led the researchers to believe that infants understood how the actor interacted with the objects.

“When the actor did not witness the removal or addition of the preferred object, the infants seemed to use that information to interpret the person’s actions,” Luo said. “The infants appear to recognize that the actor’s behavior comes from what the actor could see or could not see and hence what the actor thinks, and this finding is consistent with similar false belief studies that involve older children.”

Read it here. 

If you’re interested in additional infant research, I highly recommend Alison Gopnik’s latest, The Philosophical Baby. 

This is from SFARI News and Opinion: 

In 1973, psychophysicist Gunnar Johansson attached ten reflectiveam patches to the body of an actor and filmed him moving around in a dark room. A group of healthy adults who watched the film were not only able to recognize human motion in the pattern of lights, but also to infer the sex of the walker¹.

More than two decades later, researchers used point-of-light displaysto discover that, in people with autism, the ability to perceivebiological motion, broadly defined as movement by humans or animals, is impaired².

Since then, many studies have confirmed this finding using point-of-light displays. But it’s been unclear whether this deficit is part of a larger problem visually processing motion generally, or is confined to the detection of biological motion.

Two new studies published in the past two months independently resolve this question by suggesting that people with autism don’t have a general difficulty processing visual information. What’s more, one of the studies found that only a subset of people with autism — those with lower intelligence quotients (IQs) — have trouble perceiving biological motion, and the other found that those with low IQs are more impaired than those with higher IQs.

However, the studies suggest that no matter their level of impairment, all individuals with autism struggle to pick up social cues from bodies in motion.

“Biological motion ability seems to fall within the same domain of social understanding as do other social understanding and mentalizing tasks,” says Tony Charman, professor of psychology and human development at the University of London and an investigator on one ofthe studies.

Surprisingly, both studies reported wide differences in the ability to perceive biological motion among both people with autism and healthy controls. But in all cases, those who have trouble identifying a walking man in a pattern of dots also have trouble interpreting social cues.

The article goes on to describe two different studies which use point-of-light displays to study how adolescents with autism process this information compared to typically developing controls. 

 In healthy people, these two systems typically work together, but a growing body of evidence suggests they are somehow disconnected in many people with autism, Pelphrey says.

(…)

The imaging study clearly shows significant differences in the way that participants with autism process biological motion compared with controls, he says.

Being able to derive meaning or intent from biological motion requires the viewer’s visual processing and proprioceptive systems to be well connected, so these results are little surprise to those of us who think about how lack of connectivity between discrete sensory modalities impacts on everyday functioning. I can’t help but wonder how therapeutic intervention to enhance the child’s postural awareness and control and linking this sense to their own to their own intentionality would impact performance on this test. 

Read the whole article here. 

Thanks, Karre, for sending me this article from Science Daily: 

“A study from MIT neuroscientists reveals that high-functioning autistic adults appear to have trouble using theory of mind to make moral judgments in certain situations.

Specifically, the researchers found that autistic adults were more likely than non-autistic subjects to blame someone for accidentally causing harm to another person. This shows that their judgments rely more on the outcome of the incident than on an understanding of the person’s intentions, says Liane Young, an MIT postdoctoral associate and one of the lead authors of the study (…) 

For example, in one scenario, “Janet” and a friend are kayaking in a part of ocean with many jellyfish. The friend asks Janet if she should go for a swim. Janet has just read that the jellyfish in the area are harmless, and tells her friend to go for a swim. The friend is stung by a jellyfish and dies.

In this scenario, the researchers found that people with autism are more likely than non-autistic people to blame Janet for her friend’s death, even though she believed the jellyfish were harmless.”

Young is careful to note that within the so-called general population, there is a wide range of responses, but that there is a markedly strong tendency for subjects with autism to make this sort of concrete black-and-white moral judgement. They suggest that this sort of rule-based thinking may represent a compensatory strategy for deficits in theory of mind (i.e. inferring the intentions of an agent). 

“High-functioning” autistic people — for example, those with a milder form of autism such as Asperger’s syndrome, often develop compensatory mechanisms to deal with their difficulties in understanding other people’s thoughts. The details of these mechanisms are unknown, says Young, but they allow autistic people to function in society and to pass simple experimental tests such as determining whether someone has committed a societal “faux pas.”

It should be noted that though the title of the article suggests that this is autism research, the researchers describe their intent as an investigation into the systems responsible for processing moral judgment. Though this is fascinating stuff, I find myself more concerned about the functional implication for everyday interactions and relationships. 

I don’t know that we can draw any useful conclusions about theory of mind or moral judgment in persons with autism from this study outside the circumstances described: when presented with cold, hard facts in a morally ambiguous story, people with autism tend to make a cold, hard judgment. As usual, I find myself wondering about the conditions of the study, and, more specifically, how altering those variables might alter the outcome. 

In light of the difficulty most of our young clients have in both the efficacy and rate of processing of multi-dimensional sensory input (in other words, as events occur in the environment, they’re often challenged to attune to and make sense of the stream of information) it does seem logical that, over time, they may adopt compensatory cognitive decision-making strategies. However, if supported to better calibrate that processing system, will those individuals still adopt those strategies or can they learn to better conjure a representation of “Janet’s” perspective as she sits in the boat, recalling the newspaper article, and innocently assuring her friend that it’s safe to swim with the jellyfish? 

Similarly, though the pair in the hypothetical story are described as “friends,” there are no details in which to infer the depth or quality of that friendship. If, presented with a similarly ambiguous scenario in everyday life, will the affective meaning of the relationship play a larger role in mediating their judgment? In both cases, I suspect so. 

Read the Science Daily article here. 

If you’ve got access, the PNAS article is here. 

From Science Now: 

Researchers revisited findings that suggested that dysfunctional mirror neuron systems may explain theory of mind deficits in persons with autism and found no differences in activation when compared to typically developing controls. 

That test consisted of two types of experiments. In the first, the researchers scanned neural activity in the brains of healthy adults and high-functioning autistic adults in a functional MRI scanner while showing them one photograph after another with one of six simple hand gestures: rock, paper, scissors, thumbs up, gun, or the hang-loose hand signal favored by Hawaiian surfers. In the second experiment, they scanned subjects’ brains after instructing them through headphones to make a series of the same six hand gestures.

Two brain areas thought to contain mirror neurons, the anterior intraparietal sulcus and the ventral premotor cortex, responded similarly in autistic and control groups, whether subjects observed a hand signal or made one themselves. This suggested that the autistic group’s mirror neurons were functioning normally.

The researchers sought to confirm this with additional experiments that relied on a clever trick. When activated repeatedly, many neurons fatigue and their signals fade. What’s more, individual mirror neurons are believed to respond to specific movements—for example, the “paper” neurons are distinct from the “hang loose” neurons.

Dinstein and his colleagues assumed that if the activity of a brain region faded more when a subject repeatedly saw or reenacted a single hand signal than when he or she saw or reenacted a mixed series of hand signals, then it contained mirror neurons specific for that hand signal. In both autistic and nonautistic individuals, signals from the two mirror regions of the brain faded to a similar degree when they saw or reenacted the same hand signal over and over, the team will report tomorrow in Neuron. That suggests to Dinstein that autistic subjects’ mirror neurons are behaving normally.

Instead, the team noted that brain regions that process visual images and execute movements in autistic people fired more variably than did those in healthy people. This could be caused by malfunctioning synapses, which would make neural networks less reliable and would make signals from the world more difficult to interpret, Dinstein speculates. This faulty signaling, rather than mirror neuron problems, could underlie some of their social difficulties, he says.

This interpretation of the findings seems overly simplistic. (The comments by Justin Williams and Marco Iacoboni, who are far more knowledgeable about such things, suggest that they agree with this assertion.) Though the hand gestures presented are iconic, capable of communicating a distinct message, they were presented in isolation, i.e. without any emotional context that might be provided by facial expression, vocal tone, body position, and a myriad of other affective cues. The results of this study suggest that the mechanism for action processing is intact in people with autism- this is good news, as it suggests that the machinery is available for use, but it may not be well calibrated to synchronize input from individual sensory modalities to create a unified representation of the social world. 

Read more HERE.