Individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFA) show difficulties in the ability to react to change. A recent study suggested that variations in the functioning of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, especially in one of its markers--the cortisol awakening response (CAR)--may be related to those difficulties in adolescents with Asperger's syndrome. The current study inves...

Although high-functioning individuals with autistic disorder (i.e. autism and Asperger syndrome) are of normal intelligence, they have life-long abnormalities in social communication and emotional behaviour. However, the biological basis of social difficulties in autism is poorly understood. Facial expressions help shape behaviour, and we investigated if high-functioning people with autistic di...

The present study investigates the intersection of working memory and emotion recognition in young adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and neurotypical controls. The executive functioning theory of autism grounds key impairments within the cognitive realm, whereas social-cognitive theories view social functioning impairments as primary. Executive functioning theory of ASD has been criti...

Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PPD) refers to the group of disorders characterised by delayed or inappropriate development of multiple basic functions including socialisation, communication, behaviour and cognitive functioning. The term,,autistic spectrum disorders" was established as a result of the magnitude of the intensity of symptoms and their proportions observed in all types of perva...

Asperger's syndrome (AS) is a form of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affecting many individuals today. Although neurobiological correlates for AS have been identified, like many ASDs, AS is not completely understood. AS as a distinct disorder is also not universally accepted and in the DSM-5 AS is not considered a separate nosological entity. In contrast to some other ASDs, individuals with AS ...

Children with autism exhibit impairment in the processing of socioemotional information. The amygdala, a core structure centrally involved in socioemotional functioning, has been implicated in the neuropathology of autism. We collected structural and functional magnetic resonance images (MRI) in children 8 to 12 years of age with high-functioning autism (n=12) and typical development (n=15). Th...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to examine differences in episodic memory retrieval between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) individuals. Previous studies have shown that personality similarities between readers and characters facilitated reading comprehension. Highly extraverted participants read stories featuring extraverted protagonists...

Previous functional connectivity studies have found both hypo- and hyper-connectivity in brains of individuals having autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we studied abnormalities in functional brain subnetworks in high-functioning individuals with ASD during free viewing of a movie containing social cues and interactions. Twenty-six subjects (13 with ASD) watched a 68-min movie during function...

The cognitive science of religion is a new field which explains religious belief as emerging from normal cognitive processes such as inferring others' mental states, agency detection and imposing patterns on noise. This paper investigates the proposal that individual differences in belief will reflect cognitive processing styles, with high functioning autism being an extreme style that will pre...

This series of experiments was aimed at assessing spatial abilities in high functioning individuals with autism (HFA), using a human-size labyrinth. In the context of recent findings that the performance of individuals with HFA was superior to typically developing individuals in several non-social cognitive operations, it was expected that the HFA group would outperform a typically developing c...