Biomedical subjects

J P Teunisse

Publications and source records attributed to J P Teunisse.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

Cognitive styles in high-functioning adolescents with autistic disorder.

This study addressed the operationalization, the identification, and the prevalence of weak central coherence and poor cognitive shifting in 35 high-functioning adolescents with autism. Central coherence and cognitive shifting were represented by two factors in a factor analysis, each reflecting a constituent aspect of the domain in question. With regard to central coherence, these aspects were the ability of piecemeal processing and the ability to process meaning. The aspects related to cognitive shifting concerned internally and externally controlled shifting. Weak central coherence and poor cognitive shifting did not appear to be related to measures of symptom severity, social understanding, and social competence. Both these cognitive styles did not appear to be universal to autism. In our sample, weak central coherence and poor cognitive shifting were found to be significantly more common than in normative control subjects.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2001

Impaired categorical perception of facial expressions in high-functioning adolescents with autism.

Categorical perception of facial expressions is studied in high-functioning adolescents with autism, using three continua of facial expressions obtained by morphing. In contrast to the results of normal adults, the performance on the identification task in autistic subjects did not predict performance on the discrimination task, an indication that autistic individuals do not perceive facial expressions categorically. Performance of autistic subjects with low social intelligence was more impaired than that of subjects with higher social IQ scores on the expression recognition of unmanipulated photographs. It is suggested that autistic subjects with higher social intelligence may use compensatory strategies that they have acquired in social training programs This may camouflage the deficits of this subgroup in the perception of facial expressions.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1999

Relationship between memory strategies and motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease.

Patients with Parkinson's disease(PD) show a serious decrease in performance on tasks which lack explicit guidelines and which necessitate the subject to develop his or her own strategy. Using the California Verbal Learning Task(CVLT) we have found evidence that this phenomenon becomes also manifest in learning and memory. The goal of the present study on PD was to investigate whether or not there is an intrinsic relationship between PD-specific deviant learning characteristics and the severity of motor symptomatology. The results show, as expected, a significant correlation between the severity of bradykinetic/hypokinetic symptoms and the serial clustering gradient of the CVLT: the more bradykinetic PD patients (n = 48) were, the more they were dependent on the externally guided serial learning strategy. The findings are discussed in the context of our hypothesis that the actual deficit in patients with PD is a deficient processing of ambiguous internal cues.

Cluster Analysis↗

PubMed1994

Do autistics have a generalized face processing deficit?

The study presents results from a clinical test battery (Bruyer & Schweich, 1991; Schweich & Bruyer, 1993) that is used to study components in the face recognition system of autistic children. The results of the autistics are compared with the performance of two age groups of normal children (7-10 years, 12-16 years) and an adult control group. Autistic subjects, like young children, make more errors on a task in which they have to match facial features in the context of a complete face but not when the features are presented in isolation or in a simplified facial context. Finally, the sensitivity of the battery for clinical populations other than prosopagnosics is discussed.

Adolescent↗