ALTERED BRAIN ACTIVITY IN AUTISTIC CHILDREN VERSUS HEALTHY CONTROLS WHILE PERFORMING SIMPLE TASKS USING fMRI by Donald Martin Adams, Jr. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies dealing with Autistic children have primarily been concerned with cognitive facial recognition. Recent studies have demonstrated that Autistic children, when compared to healthy matched controls, exhibit hig...

It has been discovered about a decade ago that autistic children cannot reason properly about mental states and mental actions of themselves and others (Baron-Cohen 1988, Leslie 1987). In particular, autistic patients demonstrate the lack of perceiving the emotions of themselves and others as well as the reduced emotional behavior. We extend the psychological observations and the " theory of mi...

Previous work has demonstrated that patterns of social attention hold predictive value for language development in typically developing infants. The goal of this research was to explore how patterns of attention in autistic, language delayed, and typically developing children relate to early word learning and language abilities. We tracked patterns of eye movements to faces and objects while ch...

Non-autistic relatives of people with autistic disorder have an increased risk of social and communicative difficulties: this is known as the "broad phenotype." Better methods for characterizing the broad phenotype are needed to facilitate identification of risk genes for autism. 29 siblings of 20 children with autistic disorder, 13 siblings of 9 children with PDDNOS, and 46 typically developin...

BACKGROUND Autistic disorder (AD) is a disabling oligogenic condition characterized by severe social impairment. Subthreshold autistic social impairments are known to aggregate in the family members of autistic probands; therefore, we conducted this study to examine the intergenerational transmission of such traits in the general population. METHODS The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), a qu...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder currently affecting as many as 1 out of 166 children in the United States. Numerous studies of autistic individuals have revealed evidence of cerebral hypoperfusion, neuroinflammation and gastrointestinal inflammation, immune dysregulation, oxidative stress, relative mitochondrial dysfunction, neurotransmitter abnormalities, impaired detoxification of tox...

Central tendency, the tendency of judgements of quantities (lengths, durations etc.) to gravitate towards their mean, is one of the most robust perceptual effects. A Bayesian account has recently suggested that central tendency reflects the integration of noisy sensory estimates with prior knowledge representations of a mean stimulus, serving to improve performance. The process is flexible, so ...