Autism is a highly heterogeneous disorder with wide variability in social functioning. Many diagnostic and neuropsychological tests exist which assess social functioning, but thus far few attempts have been made to classify distinct social phenotypes in autism, thereby reducing phenotypic heterogeneity and improving efforts to identify candidate genes. In this project we will use clustering pro...

BACKGROUND Hypoactivation of the inferior frontal gyrus during the perception of facial expressions has been interpreted as evidence for a deficit of the mirror neuron system in children with autism. We examined whether this dysfunction persists in adulthood, and how brain activity in the mirror neuron system relates to social functioning outside the laboratory. METHODS Twenty-one adult males...

In autism, severe abnormalities in social behavior coexist with aberrant attention and deficient language. In the attentional domain, attention to people and socially relevant stimuli is impaired the most. Because socially meaningful stimulus events are physically complex, a deficiency in sensory processing of complex stimuli has been suggested to contribute to aberrant attention and language i...

Background: Difficulty with social interaction is universal in autism spectrum disorders and often constitutes the most debilitating feature of these conditions. Impaired social cognition (i.e., perceiving the emotions and intentions of others) makes it difficult to establish friendships and form positive social relationships, and is particularly incapacitating for adults with autism who must n...

It has been suggested that theory of mind may rely on several precursors including gaze processing, joint attention, the ability to distinguish between actions of oneself and others, and the ability to represent goal-directed actions. Some of these processes have been shown to be impaired in individuals with autism, who experience difficulties in theory of mind. However, little is known about a...

Although circumscribed interests are pathognomonic with autism, much about these interests remains unknown. Using the Interests Scale (IS), this study compares interests between 76 neurotypical (NT) individuals and 109 individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD) matched groupwise on age, IQ, and gender ratio. Participants and their parents/caregivers completed diagnostic...

Autism is associated with widespread atypicalities in perception, cognition and social behavior. A crucial question concerns how these atypicalities are reflected in the underlying brain activation. One way to examine possible perturbations of cortical organization in autism is to analyze the activation of category-selective ventral visual cortex, already clearly delineated in typical populatio...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was investigating and comparing two components of executive functioning in children with high function autism with normal children. METHODS This study was correlation descriptive (causal-comparative). There were two groups, one consisted of 15 participants of children with high function autism disorder (Intelligence quotient [IQ]>80) and the other consisted of ...

This study examined emotional awareness in children with autism. Twenty-two high functioning children with autism (mean age 10 years and 2 months) and 22 typically developing children, matched for age and gender, were presented with the four basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness and fear) in single and multiple emotion tasks. Findings suggest that children with autism have difficulties iden...