Journal

The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

[Vol.24 No.1 contents]
Japanese/English

Full Text of this Article
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ArticleTitle Neuropsychological studies of Autism Spectrum Disorders
Language E
AuthorList Uta Frith
Affiliation University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and University of Aarhus, Niels Bohr Project 'Interacting Minds'
Publication Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 24 (1), 2-17, 2008
Received
Accepted
Abstract Individuals with autism are unable to share fully in our social world and have a different way of perceiving the physical world. The impairments in social interaction and communication as well as the non-social features can range from severe to mild, and this is why we now talk of a whole spectrum of autistic disorders (ASD), with the likelihood that eventually different subgroups will be distinguished.
Neuropsychological approaches can help us to understand what it means for an individual to have an autistic spectrum disorder. These approaches can provide answers to a number of questions: what happens when normal development is derailed from the start; what kind of compensation can occur, and why faulty and compensatory processes together can result in a particular pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Three theories are currently used to explain these.
The first theory attempts to explain the difficulties in reciprocal social communication and proposes that there is a fault in the brain's mechanism that underlies mentalising. This refers to the capacity to attribute mental states to others and to self. Lacking the neurological basis for this intuitive capacity, more able individuals with ASD can still learn about mental states, and to use them to predict behaviour. However, this learning is slow and effortful. Brain imaging reveals that the brain's mentalising system in able adults with ASD is functioning at a reduced level, with poor connectivity between its components.
A second theory, executive function impairment, explains difficulties in coping with daily life often experienced as perseveration and rigidity. Current studies confirm deficits in multitasking and point to functional abnormalities in medial prefrontal cortex. The third theory, referred to as weak central coherence (WCC), attempts to explain the unusual cognitive strengths in individuals with ASD, such as superior perception of detail, which go together with the loss of overall meaning. The cost of a detail focused processing style is an inability to take account of the context in which the detail is embedded and which can change its meaning. An update of WCC suggests that a preference of local over global processing may be due to a lack of top-down attentional control. This lack of control may be due to poor connections between bottom-up and top-down information processing pathways in the brain.
Keywords mentalising, theory of mind, executive functions, central coherence, top-down modulation

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