ACG Actigraphy ADHD Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder ANOVA Analysis of variance AS Asperger syndrome CBCL Children's behaviour checklist CDI Children's depression inventory CI Confidence interval CSRF Children's self-report form for sleep disturbances DSPS Delayed sleep phase syndrome EEG Electroencephalography fMRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging INCL Infantile neuronal ceroi...

Only a handful of longitudinal case reports on autism spectrum disorders exist in the literature. In this study, we present the follow-up data on two subjects with infantile autism and one with Asperger syndrome over 40 years after initial diagnosis. Their childhood phenomenology had been described in detail in a historic monograph by Gerhard Bosch (1962, 1970). The trajectories of his three fo...

Despite the rapid growth of interest in Asperger disorder in children, there continues to be a lack of awareness of the diagnosis and its implications for adolescents and adults. The reasons for this lack of awareness lie in the history of the disorder and in the historical development of mental health services. Because, as Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to r...

This article considers whether Asperger syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA) necessarily leads to disability or whether AS/HFA simply leads to "difference." It concludes that the term "difference" in relation to AS/ HFA is a more neutral, value-free, and fairer description than terms such as "impairment," "deficiency," or "disability"; that the term "disability" only applies to the lo...

Single trial methods reveal unimpaired free recall of unrelated words in Asperger's syndrome (AS). When repeated trials are used (free recall learning), typical individuals show improved recall over trials, subjective organisation of material (SO) and a correlation between free recall and SO. We tested oral (Experiment 1) and written (Experiment 2) free recall over 16 trials in adults with AS a...

Adults with Asperger syndrome can understand mental states such as desires and beliefs (mentalizing) when explicitly prompted to do so, despite having impairments in social communication. We directly tested the hypothesis that such individuals nevertheless fail to mentalize spontaneously. To this end, we used an eye-tracking task that has revealed the spontaneous ability to mentalize in typical...

Across the autism spectrum, level of intelligence is highly dependent on the psychometric instrument used for assessment, and there are conflicting views concerning which measures best estimate autistic cognitive abilities. Inspection time is a processing speed measure associated with general intelligence in typical individuals. We therefore investigated autism spectrum performance on inspectio...