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Biomedical subjects

Uta Frith

Publications and source records attributed to Uta Frith.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2007

Do readers with autism make bridging inferences from world knowledge?

Individuals with autism frequently show impairments in text reading comprehension. This often is attributed to poor ability to draw inferences during reading and to inadequate access to relevant knowledge. The current study tested this hypothesis by measuring the time taken to read the same question, relating to either physical or social world knowledge, when it was either relevant or irrelevant to the bridging inference evoked by a preceding two-sentence vignette. In the study, 16 normally developing adolescents and 16 adolescents with autism were matched on word reading accuracy, chronological age, and vocabulary but differed significantly in text comprehension. A strong priming effect was found, robust over participants and over items; participants read those questions that were relevant to the inference evoked by the vignette faster than they read those questions that were irrelevant, and no interaction with group membership or type of knowledge was found. This indicates that readers with autism, just like controls, were activating appropriate world knowledge primed by implicit inferences while reading the vignettes. Thus, the comprehension problems in these readers cannot be attributed to an inability to make implicit inferences or to draw on relevant world knowledge. Instead, we suggest that these problems must be sought at a higher level of text processing.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Autism spectrum disorder and psychopathy: shared cognitive underpinnings or double hit?

BACKGROUND: We measured psychopathic traits in boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) selected for difficult and aggressive behaviour. We asked (i) whether psychopathic tendencies can be measured in ASD independent of the severity of autistic behaviour; (ii) whether individuals with ASD with callous-unemotional (CU) traits differ in their cognitive profile from those without such traits; and (iii) how the cognitive data from this study compare with previous data of youngsters with psychopathic tendencies. METHOD: Twenty-eight ASD boys were rated on psychopathic tendencies, autistic traits and a range of cognitive measures assessing mentalizing ability, executive functions, emotion recognition and ability to make moral-conventional distinction. RESULTS: Our results indicate that psychopathic tendencies are not related to severity of ASD. In addition, such tendencies do not seem to be related to core autistic cognitive deficits, specifically in 'mind-reading' or executive function. Boys with co-occurring ASD and CU tendencies share some behaviours and aspects of cognitive profile with boys who have psychopathic tendencies alone. CONCLUSIONS: Callous/psychopathic acts in a small number of individuals with ASD probably reflect a 'double hit' involving an additional impairment of empathic response to distress cues, which is not part and parcel of ASD itself.

Antisocial Personality Disorder↗
PubMed2006

The neural basis of mentalizing.

Mentalizing refers to our ability to read the mental states of other agents and engages many neural processes. The brain's mirror system allows us to share the emotions of others. Through perspective taking, we can infer what a person currently believes about the world given their point of view. Finally, the human brain has the unique ability to represent the mental states of the self and the other and the relationship between these mental states, making possible the communication of ideas.

Brain↗
PubMed2006

Attention does not modulate neural responses to social stimuli in autism spectrum disorders.

We investigated whether individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) would show attentional modulation for social (face) and non-social (house) stimuli. Sixteen individuals with ASD and 16 matched control participants completed a task in which pairs of face and house stimuli were present on every trial, with one of the pairs randomly assigned to attended locations and the other to unattended locations. Both mass-univariate (SPM) and region of interest analyses suggested that responses to houses were modulated by attention in both groups, but that only the control participants demonstrated attentional modulation of face-selective regions. Thus, the participants with ASD demonstrated a lack of attentional modulation which was particularly evident for the social stimulus. Analyses of effective connectivity indicated that these results were due to a failure of attention to modulate connectivity between extrastriate areas and V1. We discuss how these results may suggest a mechanism to explain the reduced salience of social stimuli in ASD.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

How we predict what other people are going to do.

We present a framework for discussing two major aspects of social cognition: the ability to predict what another person is like and what another person is likely to do next. In the first part of this review, we discuss studies that concern knowledge of others as members of a group and as individuals with habitual dispositions. These include studies of group stereotypes and of individual reputation, derived either from experience in reciprocal social interactions such as economic games or from indirect observation and cultural information. In the second part of the review, we focus on processes that underlie our knowledge about actions, intentions, feelings and beliefs. We discuss studies on the ability to predict the course of motor actions and of the intentions behind actions. We also consider studies of contagion and sharing of feelings. Lastly, we discuss studies of spatial and mental perspective taking and the importance of the perception of communicative intent. In the final section of this review, we suggest that the distinction between top-down and bottom-up processes, originally applied to non-social cognitive functions, is highly relevant to social processes. While social stimuli automatically elicit responses via bottom-up processes, responses to the same stimuli can be modulated by explicit instructions via top-down processes. In this way, they provide an escape from the tyranny of strong emotions that are readily aroused in social interactions.

Cognition↗
PubMed2006

Tactile sensitivity in Asperger syndrome.

People with autism and Asperger syndrome are anecdotally said to be hypersensitive to touch. In two experiments, we measured tactile thresholds and suprathreshold tactile sensitivity in a group of adults with Asperger syndrome. In the first experiment, tactile perceptual thresholds were measured. Two frequencies of vibrotactile stimulation were used: 30 and 200 Hz. The results demonstrated significantly lower tactile perceptual thresholds in the Asperger group at 200 Hz but not at 30 Hz, thus confirming tactile hypersensitivity but only for one class of stimulus. A second experiment investigated whether self-produced movement affected the perception of touch in a group of adults with Asperger syndrome. A suprathreshold tactile stimulus was produced either by the participant (self-produced condition) or by the experimenter (externally produced condition) and participants were asked to rate the perception of the tactile stimulation. The results demonstrated that, while both Asperger and control groups rated self-produced touch as less tickly than external touch, the Asperger group rated both types of tactile stimulus as significantly more tickly and intense than did the control group. This experiment confirms the finding of tactile hypersensitivity, but shows that the perceptual consequences of self-produced touch are attenuated in the normal way in people with Asperger syndrome. An abnormality in this process cannot therefore account for their tactile hypersensitivity.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

An islet of social ability in Asperger Syndrome: judging social attributes from faces.

We asked adults with Asperger Syndrome to judge pictorial stimuli in terms of certain social stereotypes to evaluate to what extent they have access to this type of social knowledge. Sixteen adults with Asperger Syndrome and 24 controls, matched for age and intelligence, were presented with sets of faces, bodies and objects, which had to be rated on a 7-point scale in terms of trustworthiness, attractiveness, social status, and age, or, in the case of objects, price. Despite impaired performance on two important aspects of social cognition (second-order mentalizing and face recognition) the social judgements of the individuals with Asperger Syndrome were just as competent and consistent as those of their matched controls, with only one exception: there was a trend for them to be less able to judge the attractiveness of faces if they were the same sex. We explain this difference in terms of a weakness in mentalizing, specifically the ability to take a different point of view: While all other stereotypic attributions could be made from an egocentric point of view, judging the attractiveness of faces of one's own sex requires taking the perspective of someone of the opposite sex, a challenge for people with mentalizing problems. We conclude that individuals with Asperger Syndrome show preserved aspects of social knowledge, as revealed in the attribution of stereotypes to pictures of people. These findings suggest that there are dissociable subcomponents to social cognition and that not all of these are compromised in Asperger Syndrome.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

The weak coherence account: detail-focused cognitive style in autism spectrum disorders.

"Weak central coherence" refers to the detail-focused processing style proposed to characterise autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The original suggestion of a core deficit in central processing resulting in failure to extract global form/meaning, has been challenged in three ways. First, it may represent an outcome of superiority in local processing. Second, it may be a processing bias, rather than deficit. Third, weak coherence may occur alongside, rather than explain, deficits in social cognition. A review of over 50 empirical studies of coherence suggests robust findings of local bias in ASD, with mixed findings regarding weak global processing. Local bias appears not to be a mere side-effect of executive dysfunction, and may be independent of theory of mind deficits. Possible computational and neural models are discussed.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed2006

The role of sensorimotor impairments in dyslexia: a multiple case study of dyslexic children.

This study attempts to investigate the role of sensorimotor impairments in the reading disability that characterizes dyslexia. Twenty-three children with dyslexia were compared to 22 control children, matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, on tasks assessing literacy as well as phonological, visual, auditory and motor abilities. The dyslexic group as a whole were significantly impaired on phonological, but not sensorimotor, tasks. Analysis of individual data suggests that the most common impairments were on phonological and visual stress tasks and the vast majority of dyslexics had one of these two impairments. Furthermore, phonological skill was able to account for variation in literacy skill, to the exclusion of all sensorimotor factors, while neither auditory nor motor skill predicted any variance in phonological skill. Visual stress seems to account for a small proportion of dyslexics, independently of the commonly reported phonological deficit. However, there is little evidence for a causal role of auditory, motor or other visual impairments.

Child↗
PubMed2005

Vagaries of visual perception in autism.

Three classes of perceptual phenomena have repeatedly been associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD): superior processing of fine detail (local structure), either inferior processing of overall/global structure or an ability to ignore disruptive global/contextual information, and impaired motion perception. This review evaluates the quality of the evidence bearing on these three phenomena. We argue that while superior local processing has been robustly demonstrated, conclusions about global processing cannot be definitively drawn from the experiments to date, which have generally not precluded observers using more local cues. Perception of moving stimuli is impaired in ASD, but explanations in terms of magnocellular/dorsal deficits do not appear to be sufficient. We suggest that abnormalities in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) may provide a neural basis for the range of motion-processing deficits observed in ASD, including biological motion perception. Such an explanation may also provide a link between perceptual abnormalities and specific deficits in social cognition associated with autism.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed2005

Theory of mind.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Brain↗
PubMed2005

Where does your own action influence your perception of another person's action in the brain?

Activation of premotor cortex during the observation and imitation of human actions is now increasingly accepted, but it remains unclear how the CNS is able to resolve potential conflicts between the observation of another person's action and the ongoing control of one's own action. Recent data suggest that this overlap leads to a systematic bias, where lifting a box influences participant's perceptual judgments of the weight of a box lifted by another person. We now investigate the neural basis of this bias effect using fMRI. Seventeen participants performed a perceptual weight judgment task or two control conditions while lifting a light box, a heavy box or no box during scanning. Brain regions related to perceptual bias were localized by correlating individual differences in bias with BOLD signal. Five regions were found to show correlations with psychophysical bias: left inferior frontal gyrus, left central sulcus, left extrastriate body area, left lingual gyrus and right intraparietal sulcus. The cluster in primary motor cortex was also activated by box lifting, and the cluster in extrastriate body area by the observation of hand actions and the weight judgment task. We suggest that these brain areas are part of a network where motor processing modulates perceptual judgment of observed human actions, and thus visual and motor processes cannot be thought of as two distinct systems, but instead interact at many levels.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Egocentrism, allocentrism, and Asperger syndrome.

In this paper, we attempt to make a distinction between egocentrism and allocentrism in social cognition, based on the distinction that is made in visuo-spatial perception. We propose that it makes a difference to mentalizing whether the other person can be understood using an egocentric ("you") or an allocentric ("he/she/they") stance. Within an egocentric stance, the other person is represented in relation to the self. By contrast, within an allocentric stance, the existence or mental state of the other person needs to be represented as independent from the self. We suggest here that people with Asperger syndrome suffer from a disconnection between a strong naïve egocentric stance and a highly abstract allocentric stance. We argue that the currently used distinction between first-person and third-person perspective-taking is orthogonal to the distinction between an egocentric and an allocentric stance and therefore cannot serve as a critical test of allocentrism.

Asperger Syndrome↗
PubMed2004

More than words: a common neural basis for reading and naming deficits in developmental dyslexia?

Dyslexic individuals show subtle impairments in naming pictures of objects in addition to their difficulties with reading. The present study investigated whether word reading and picture naming deficits in developmental dyslexia can be reduced to a common neurological impairment. Eight dyslexic subjects, impaired on measures of reading, spelling and naming speed, were matched for age and general ability with 10 control subjects. Participants were scanned using PET during two experimental conditions: reading words and naming pictures in the form of corresponding line drawings. In addition, two high-level baseline conditions were used to control for visual and articulatory processes. Relative to the control group, the dyslexic participants showed reduced activation in a left occipitotemporal area during both word reading and picture naming. This was the case even in the context of intact behavioural performance during scanning. Abnormal activation in this region, as reported previously for reading, is therefore not specific to orthographic decoding but may reflect a more general impairment in integrating phonology and visual information. Our investigation points to a common neurological basis for deficits in word reading and picture naming in developmental dyslexia.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Your own action influences how you perceive another person's action.

A growing body of neuroimaging and neurophysiology studies has demonstrated the motor system's involvement in the observation of actions, but the functional significance of this is still unclear. One hypothesis suggests that the motor system decodes observed actions. This hypothesis predicts that performing a concurrent action should influence the perception of an observed action. We tested this prediction by asking subjects to judge the weight of a box lifted by an actor while the subject either lifted or passively held a light or heavy box. We found that actively lifting a box altered the perceptual judgment; an observed box was judged to be heavier when subjects were lifting the light box, and it was judged to be lighter when they were lifting the heavy box. This result is surprising because previous studies have found facilitating effects of movement on perceptual judgments and facilitating effects of observed actions on movements, but here we found the opposite. We hypothesize that this effect can be understood in terms of overlapping neural systems for motor control and action-understanding if multiple models of possible observed and performed actions are processed.

Adult↗