Autistic skill or social deficit?
Research from the Yale University Child Study Center provides further evidence that autistic children view the world in markedly different ways than their non autistic peers. They were specifically looking at differences in attention to biological movement. According to the announcement by the National Institute of Health, who helped fund the study:
The researchers borrowed a technique from the video game industry, called motion capture. They then reduced the movements to only points of light at each joint in the body, like animated constellations. These cartoons played normally — upright and forward — on one half of the screen, but upside-down and in reverse on the other half. The inverted presentation engages different brain circuits and is known to disrupt perception of biological motion in young children. The normal soundtrack of the actor’s voice, recorded when the animations were made, accompanied the presentations.
You can view some of these animations in the New Scientist report on line
Yale recruited a sample of autistic toddlers and two control groups - normally developing toddlers matched for age and non-verbal intelligence and developmentally delayed toddlers matched for age and verbal intelligence. Then they showed them the animations and measured their attention to the biological and non biological animations.
Virginia Hughes, writing for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, tell us that
the toddlers with autism showed no preference for the upright figure when watching the peek-a-boo animations, looking at it 50.7 percent of the time, compared with 58.9 percent of the time for the developmentally delayed group and 62.7 percent for typical controls.
When watching the pat-a-cake animations, however, the autism group looked at the upright figure 65.9 percent of the time, significantly more than at the inverted figure. The pattern for the two control groups remained the same.
Not surprisingly non-autistic children showed a preference for cartoons played normally. Autistic children seemed not to have a preference, except for the pat-a-cake animation. The study team realized that this was because the movement of the dots of light synchronized with the clapping sound in the sound track. So they looked for less obvious audiovisual synchronies (AVS) in the other four animations. The AVS was less powerful in these other four animations than in the pat-a-cake example but still they found
“Audio-visual synchronies accounted for about 90 percent of the preferred viewing patterns of toddlers with ASD and none of unaffected toddlers,” said Jones. “Typically-developing children focused instead on the most socially relevant information.”
To test if the autistic toddlers were attending to AVS in preference to biological movement they recruited a fresh set of autistic toddlers and devised two more animations whose AVS was stronger than the unintended AVS in the four animations but less than the powerful AVS of the pat-a-cake animaton. If autistic attention was related to the strength of AVS they should be able to predict the new cohort’s preferred viewing patterns. And they did.
The study provides strong evidence that autistic toddlers do not have a preference for biological movement but are drawn to AVS that are ignored by non autistic peers and are not immediately apparent to research scientists without the assistance of computer analysis. This is potentially both a benefit and a deficit. Elizabeth Moon has written a novel, The Speed of Dark, about autistic adults whose ability to detect patterns and synchronies was valued while their need for accommodations in order to exercise this ability was decried. The novel’s strength derives in part from the author’s ability to exploit the dramatic tension between these two conflicting positions.
In contrast the present study does not even begin to acknowledge the potential strengths of this talent for detecting synchronies. Instead it focuses entirely on the negative aspects. The authors suggest that because attention to biological movement is such a robust feature, occurring across species and persisting in humans who are blind or cognitively impaired, its apparent absence in autism is enough to explain all the familiar impairments.
The authors explain it thus
Typically developing human infants preferentially attend to biological motion within the first days of life1. This ability is highly conserved across species2, 3 and is believed to be critical for filial attachment and for detection of predators4. The neural underpinnings of biological motion perception are overlapping with brain regions involved in perception of basic social signals such as facial expression and gaze direction5, and preferential attention to biological motion is seen as a precursor to the capacity for attributing intentions to others6.
There is a problem here. Klin et al argue that autistic subjects do not exhibit preferential attention to biological motion. Then they up the stakes dramatically with their reference to the ability to attend to biological motion. Ability and preference are not the same thing. Then comes another giant leap, suggesting that because of neural overlap with brain areas associated with facial expression and gaze direction, a preference for biological motion is somehow responsible for theory of mind.
So, rather than being an ability, enhanced awareness of audio-visual synchronies is a disability because it comes at the expense of attending to biological motion, which is believed to be critical for bonding with a caregiver, recognizing danger , developing social cognition and acquiring theory of mind. It may be that Klin et al are right and this skill is critical. But it is a bit of a leap to suggest that this is what their experiment tested for and that it is lacking in autistic children. If it is so highly conserved across species, the fact that it is not evident in autistic subjects in this experiment suggests not that it is absent or weak, rather that it is being overridden by higher brain functions. If it is so basic to survival that snails have it, its lack should present as a catastrophic deficit in humans. It would be interesting to devise an experiment to discover in what circumstances autistic children (and adults for that matter) do exercise a preference for biological movement. If it is so important we should be looking for ways to encourage it that do not diminish the achievements of autistic children in attending to patterns and synchronies in their environment.
Klin’s research is valuable. It is a pity that the commentary on the results overstated its importance and sought to overplay the potential disabling effects for autistic people while failing to acknowledge any potential strengths that might derive from synchronous thinking. Research that adds to our understanding should not need to be dramatized in this way.
Footnote
Morton Ann Gernsbacher has written some trenchant pieces about how preconceptions can influence the interpretation of research results. For example
Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott “false memory” paradigm, two groups of participants were presented auditorily with lists of semantically related words (e.g., bed, rest, awake, tired, and dream), and later asked to discriminate between words they’d heard and words they hadn’t heard, including words that were semantically associated to words they’d heard (e.g., sleep). As shown in Figure 2, the green group demonstrated significantly better memory discrimination than the purple group; the green group was less likely to falsely recognize words they hadn’t heard, despite the false words’ semantic association with words they’d heard.
The green group’s better memory discrimination was attributed to their mentally representing words “in an aberrant manner,” even though a concurrent — and direct — test of semantic clustering found no differences between the green and purple groups. The green group’s aberrant semantic mental representations was hypothesized to stem from “anatomic abnormalities … or as a result of an as-yet unknown pathology.”
When another research team reported no difference between green- and purple-type participants in either false recall or false recognition, the authors of the study that had observed the green group’s better discrimination interpreted the other study’s lack of a between-group difference to the green group also having “frontal-executive impairment.”
No prizes for guessing that the green group were autistic. In another article she points out that if you are autistic:
having a thicker cortex than someone who is not autistic is considered bad (Hardan et al., 2006) — and having a thinner cortex than someone who is not autistic is also considered bad (Chung et al., 2005; Hadjikhani et al., 2006a, 2006b). Your thicker cortex might be a function of higher fluid intelligence (Dawson et al., 2006; Fjell et al., 2006); your thinner cortex might be a function of better memory retrieval (Sowell et al., 2001). It doesn’t matter: If you’re autistic, having either a thicker or thinner cortex is just considered bad.
Comment by Kent Adams | May 12th, 2009
Excellent, especially with Gernsbacher’s contribution. What I think is interesting particularly is what does this tell us, except a point in time, a “balance sheet” snap shot at a particular time. It does not address the long term development. Many interests my son had as a toddler have given way to more typical responses, albeit at a later age than other children. I’m not sure the study really tells us much other than what was occurring at this snapshot. I don’t think Klin can make any assumptions about how this affects development if it does at all.
Comment by Synesthesia (Lynn Gibson) | May 12th, 2009
Interesting….
I read the book Speed of Dark.
I’m trying to figure out why I didn’t like that book.
Maybe it was the way the main character and everyone around him kept going on and on about normal, but I still have no idea what that means…
Or perhaps it was the ending.
Comment by laurentius rex | May 13th, 2009
I have had some distrust of Yale’s agenda for some time, in so far as they effectively set out to define a set of impairments and prove that they exist, thus subhumanising there experimental “subjects”
It is almost as if these scientists have a pathological need for disorders of increasing severity to justify there existence.
Comment by Chris | May 13th, 2009
Synthesthesia, about the book “Speed of Dark”… there are differences of opinion about it, even with its author. I’m not sure I agree with her:
http://www.speedofdark-thebook.com/blog/?p=57#comment-185
Anyway, I still think it is a good book in the vein of “be careful of what you wish for!”
Comment by Harold L Doherty | May 13th, 2009
Almost a balanced commentary on an interesting study. Well done. You should try for just a bit more balance though before relapsing into your standard ideology if you truly want to appear to be objective and professional. Adding Gernsbacher’s caution to your assessment of THIS study betrays your ideological bent as does your resort to a “novel”, a work of fiction to undermine the Yale study results.
I take it Gernsbacher’s “contribution” concerning preconception influencing research results apply to everyone, including you, laurentius rex and others who do not see Autism as a disorder?
If so, should we factor your preconceptions into your assessment of the Yale study and interpretation of its results?
Comment by Mike | May 13th, 2009
Harold
I did not try to undermine the Yale results. I questioned whether these results actually supported some of the conclusions drawn by Klin et al. Regarding preconceptions, once more may I remind you that I do regard autism as a disorder. Your own preconceptions about me should be factored into any assessment of your comments.
Comment by Barbara | May 13th, 2009
This was an interesting study which in its writing-up demonstrates much of what I’ve noted in my PhD research about Klin’s ‘deficit’ take on ASCs. One of the papers he co-authored, on Special Interests (which they call ‘circumscribed interests’), was particularly biased, as it contained such statements as ‘…non-adaptive pursuits such as an encyclopaedic knowledge of sports’ statistics…’,and I wondered if Klin lived in a parallel universe to those of us in the UK who witnessed the rise of Angus Loughran (’Statto’).
My PhD is on ‘autistic intelligence’ and what it is, and how it can be recognised and accommodated in education. The consensus appears to be growing that it is a Local Processing Bias, although Global Processing isn’t absent if the task demands require it. Mottron and his team, including Michelle Dawson, have done considerable work on this, and it also serves to understand the emergence of savant/intuitive patterning skills if children’s natural processing abilities are not undermined by normalising agendas. By understanding autistic intelligence in this way, we highlight the role that sensory processing can play, and the accommodations that others can make to enable this to operate successfully. It’s a win-win situation. And empowering for both students and teachers.
And btw, I didn’t invent the term autistic intelligence. Hans Asperger did. And he wasn’t a psychologist. He was a paediatric general doctor, but principally engaged as a Remedial Educationalist in the field of orthopedagogy.
Comment by laurentius rex | May 13th, 2009
Harold if you have ever heard me presenting, I am more aware than anyone of potential bias, that is one of the things I spoke on at the NAS international conference.
The best way to approach the subject of autism is to doubt everything that is known, and then see where the data is leading, have you ever heard of Glaser and Strause’s grounded thery?
I will quote again for it is worth quoting from Dermot Bowlers summary of current thery
“Autism spectrum disorder is now known to be a set of conditions that should not be reduced to a simple dichotomy of presence and absence. When present the conditions are multidimensional and complex, and although they share the common characteristics of social impairment and repetitive behaviours (at least from the perspective of a typically developed person) they often exhibit additional features that are not necessarily defining features of the spectrum. Such complexity requires a more subtle explanation than a simple reduction to an absent theory of mind, a failure of affective appreciation, diminished sense of self of fragmented perception. The complexity of ASD requires us to take a more distanced view and to go beyond simply trying to find new ways of describing the fact that people with ASD are autistic Science is about the reduction of complexity to simpler sets of entities and processes that interact in ways that are controlled descriptions of the behavioural manifestations of ASD. The challenge that faces us now is to step outside our own narrow conception of the issue and to work out how they fit together and why.”
Multidemensional and complex, get that. Lorna Wing has been arguing multidimsionality over the DSM approach for some time and has differences with Yale as well.
Get with launch your rockets into Hilbert space
Comment by Barbara | May 13th, 2009
“I will quote again for it is worth quoting from Dermot Bowlers summary of current thery”
That book was published in 2007, which means it was completed in 2006.
Over 1,000 research papers are published every year, currently,on autism. It’s the fastest-moving research in the world.
Which is why, in order to stay abreast of what’s happening, national bodies have to read and take account of research papers every week, rather than relying on what happened and was recorded several (3) years ago. It’s all old news.
The Blower stuff is way behind the times. There is now a converging consensus on the issue. ‘diminished sense of self or fragmented perception’ is SO yesterday.
The ‘how they fit together and why’ is coming closer to an answer. It’s, by convergence and consensus, LPB.
But I suppose you know that?
Of course you do.
Comment by Barbara | May 13th, 2009
Sorry, Bowler.
I was allowing my non-scientific and possibly Freudian bias to slip through. As it will.
Comment by Sharon | May 14th, 2009
Great post.
This sounds like an interesting piece of research. It’s fascinating that they have discovered this skill in the autistic children studied. I agree that the spin then put on the data is unhelpful and misleading. Why can’t they be content to report their results without delving so far into the unknown with quasi-explanations? I notice that the New Scientist article says that, “Klin is now looking at whether the preference can be used to redirect their attention towards more socially relevant stimuli.”
There is such bias against autistic strengths.
Comment by laurentius rex | May 14th, 2009
Barbera of course thery moves on, and one tries to keep abreast by reading more current papers, but Bowler has done a very good summary and the jury is still out as to the phenomenon of autism.
I favour mathematical complexity and emergent properties.
The problem with autism is that everyone has decided what it is before they research it, instead of trying to fit it in with the general pattern of developmental neurology, and understand that the lable has been socially defined, it has grown haphazardly.
Genetics won’t give any pretty and concise ansers either.
Comment by laurentius rex | May 14th, 2009
And if anything it has not got any simpler than when Bowler wrote, with mutually contradictory and impossible (when compared against each other) explanations vying against each other each with validated studies, that indicates that something is wrong in the science somewhere. (and that wrong is bias, in observation, interpretation, and indeed selection of study participants)
Comment by Barbara | May 14th, 2009
Larry, over the last three years, very rapidly, and in all research disciplines which feed into the autism issues, the ‘old’ tripartite divisions Bowler refers to between the theoretical positions of ToM, CC and EF are being eroded. It is a LOT simpler now and this is happening on almost a monthly basis. I’ve had to redraft, so far, four times what I wrote in my thesis (which I started in 2006), as new findings emerge, which are producing some consensus on Local Processing Bias - over connection within modalities and underconnection to longer range brain regions like the MNS and prefrontal cortex. And that isn’t a fixed state but a differentially determined developmental process, and produces the heterogeneity noted in spectrum people. The longer-range connections do work, albeit not as efficiently and overwhelmingly as in a TD person (Typically Developing).
The LPD theory explains important ASC skills, because autistics tend to retain for much longer than TDs their sensory processing and personal algorithm formations, and this leads to superior intuitive processing for patterns, which is why there’s often great creative thinking in ASCs. Most TDs lose much of their ability to call on their sensory processing as a patterning function.
It also explains why sensory issues are among the most important characteristics of ASCs. The fact that they’ve been left out of the diagnostic criteria is shameful, as both Kanner and Asperger made them quite central to their work.
Comment by Barbara | May 14th, 2009
ognitive Neuropsychology
Volume 24, Issue 5, July 2007, Pages 550-574
Wang, L., Mottron, L., Peng, D. Berthiaume, C. Dawson, M.
Abstract
A wide variety of paradigms have shown that autistic individuals present with superior performance on visual tasks. Here, the impact of task constraints on visual hierarchical processing in autism was investigated. By employing free- and forced-choice procedures, global and local processing of Navon-type hierarchical numerals was examined in 15 autistic persons (13 males, 2 females) and a comparison group. In the free-choice condition, autistics chose global and local targets randomly, though they were faster responding to local than to global targets, regardless of visual angle and exposure duration. In contrast, the comparison group exhibited a global advantage in naming time, which was evident only for shorter exposures, as well as effects of visual angle. In the forced-choice condition, autistics presented with a more important local-to-global interference than global-to-local interference, whereas the comparison group exhibited global advantage and bidirectional interference. Overall, the autistic participants presented with atypical local-to-global interference and local advantage in incongruent conditions (where global and local targets differ), in naming time as well as accuracy. The relative insensitivity of local bias to task constraints in autistics, in comparison to nonautistic participants, indicates that local bias, with local-to-global interference, is a key and characteristic feature of autistic visual cognition and a strong candidate for the “endophenotype” of autism. © 2007 Psychology Press.
Comment by laurentius rex | May 14th, 2009
Well Mottron et al are not the only players in the game.
A selection of papers notified today includes:
Birth Defects in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Population-based, Nested Case-Control Study
Somer Dawson, Emma J. Glasson, Glenys Dixon, and Carol Bower
Am. J. Epidemiol. 2009; 169(11): p. 1296-1303
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/169/11/1296?ct=ct
Comparative Analysis of Crying in Children With Autism, Developmental Delays, and Typical Development
Gianluca Esposito and Paola Venuti
Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities. published 13 May 2009, 10.1177/1088357609336449
http://foa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1088357609336449v1?ct=ct
RE: “ADVANCED PARENTAL AGE AND THE RISK OF AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER”
Jorn Olsen and Jin Liang Zhu
Am. J. Epidemiol. 2009; 169(11): p. 1406-a
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/169/11/1406-a?ct=ct
THE AUTHORS REPLY
Maureen S. Durkin, Matthew J. Maenner, Christopher M. Cunniff, Laura A. Schieve, and Mark A. Albanese
Am. J. Epidemiol. 2009; 169(11): p. 1406-1407
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/169/11/1406?ct=ct
New Techniques in Transcription Research Extend Our Understanding of the Molecular Actions of the Vitamin D Hormone
J. Wesley Pike, Mark B. Meyer, and Melissa L. Martowicz
IBMS BoneKEy. 2009; 6(5): p. 169-180
http://www.bonekey-ibms.org/cgi/content/abstract/ibmske;6/5/169?ct=ct
Comment by laurentius rex | May 14th, 2009
Who is going to wade there way through that lot?
Comment by Joseph | May 15th, 2009
I think that a lot of the seemingly contradictory data you see in autism research has to do with control for confounding. For example, you will see that in Dr. Mottron’s work, and indeed the work of most cognitive scientists, they match cases and controls for IQ or some other ability. This is the right thing to do if you want to measure something about the autism construct that has to do with cognition. Otherwise, you could simply be measuring something that has to do with the intelligence construct. And obviously, the more intellectually disabled someone is, the more likely it is that they might be diagnosed with autism.
In research outside of cognitive science, such as that associating autism with parent age, they don’t usually match cases and controls this way. Maybe they should, though.
Comment by laurentius rex | May 15th, 2009
That is the trouble you might get better internal validity by such “cherry picking” but the question is, is it externally valid?
In the quest for rigour it becomes less universal in it’s application, not necessarily just a problem in autism science but any kind of science involving something as deeply variable as human subjects at all.
I am beginning to wonder why I bother at all, because I am effectively confounding the point of my pursuing anything useful at all, other than another study to add to the confusion.
It worries me to a great extent that any “dilletante” equipped with google and reasonable access to scholarly papers can construct almost any hypothesis and reason it with valid citations, picking only those that fit.
Well you cannot altogether blame google, you could have sat in a decent academic library with the card indexes and catalogues of abstracts and done the same years ago, it would have taken a little longer, and a bit more legwork that’s all.
I think perhaps the most valuable contribution I can make is one of critical deconstruction. (What others would call nitpicking and negative criticism)
Comment by laurentius rex | May 15th, 2009
And what really worries me, is that so many of these dedicated carreer researchers never seem to stop and ask themselves the same sort of questions I ask myself, the old Oliver Cromwell question as I call it “I beseech you in the bowells of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”
Comment by laurentius rex | May 15th, 2009
Also the IQ construct raises “gallinovular” issues (yes I know it is a big fancy word, but I like it - Chicken and Egg to the rest of the world )
That is to say, is intelectual capacity truly a bell curve equally distributed amongst all populations, in which case one would expect from any given distribution of autistically “impaired” individuals a certain given proportion who would all things being equal (I want to say ceteris paribus here, cos I like the sound better) fall within the lower domains of the curve. Or is there something about human cognition that makes that which is constructed as autism more likely to arise from that sector? Neither of which being true really tells us very much other than something about the flakiness of the constructs themselves.
Considering IQ altogether the question is whether as a whole societies (I use the plural deliberatly) are getting more of this nebulous factor, or whether the population is getting better at the tests. Now given that quantum leaps in evolution are unlikely (unless you want to correlate it all to global warming which I guess you could if you were disposed to do so) I favour that as a whole people are getting more skilled at the tests, because of the social, educational, and economic pressures to do so, it being a demand led increase. Those same pressures also lead to a greater proportion failing to keep up with the new norms of society, and hence new diagnoses arising to describe the phenomenon.
Comment by laurentius rex | May 15th, 2009
And if I wanted to write that up as an academically attractive hypothesis rather than a bit of a priori thinking - not yet drowned by a fortiori drinking :)I am sure I could cherry pick a suitable number of peer reviewed papers to give strenght to my utterances, so that it appeared that I was writing nothing original at all, but deriving my conclusions in true cautious and traditional style from the sources.
I am just too big a cynic, not to see the transparencies in academic style sometimes.
Comment by Jennie | May 26th, 2009
In the initial study, if they were really trying to assess visual perception of biological movement, as soon as they noted the AVS effect, they would have removed the soundtracks and then assessed whether there was still any difference in attention to biological movement. This would not have given much information about the *ability* of autistic children to perceive biological movement, merely the preference for attending to it, but it would have removed the obvious issue of auditory and visual stimuli competing for attention. I fail to understand how preferring to watch visual input that has a meaningful relationship to the auditory input that is occurring simultaneously is evidence of a “deficit” in anything, except perhaps the willingness to ignore auditory stimuli in favor of visual stimuli.
Similarly, in the “green” and “purple” group experiments with semantic clustering, the higher performance of the “green” group is easily explained in terms of better auditory attention and auditory memory (a finding that would seem to be supported directly by the data, and that would be in keeping with the first study’s findings) rather than by an unverifiable “abberant semantic representation”. What ever happened to Ockham’s Razor?
I would say that this makes me want to bang my head against the wall, but I don’t want to stereotype myself…