INTRODUCTION I first heard the term ‘Asperger syndrome’ 20 years ago when I accompanied my sister-in-law Elizabeth and her son Ivan on a visit to a child psychiatrist. Ivan was 19 years old and had an odd pattern of behaviours since childhood. As none of the experts he had seen had been able to clearly diagnose his problem, we hoped that this new consultation would give a better insight into hi...

We discuss the development of an embodied conversational agent with Asperger-like communication skills. The agent was developed for use in educational software in a virtual environment specifically aimed at autism spectrum disorder software. We describe the design and implementation of the agent, and pay particular attention to the interaction between emotion, personality and social context. A ...

More than 60 years ago, two very similar descriptions of children displaying severe social deficits and unusual behaviours were published, one in English, one in German, both using the term ‘autistic’. Leo Kanner (1943) in Baltimore, USA, described 11 children with ‘early infantile autism’ in his seminal paper ‘Autistic disturbances of affective contact’. In the same year, October 1943, Hans As...

Although people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have severe problems with pragmatic aspects of language, little is known about their pragmatic reasoning. We carried out a behavioral study on high-functioning adults with autistic disorder (n = 11) and Asperger syndrome (n = 17) and matched controls (n = 28) to investigate whether they are capable of deriving scalar implicatures, which...

Two groups of individuals, one with high-functioning autism and the other with Asperger syndrome were tested using Happé's Strange Stories Test of a more advanced theory of mind (Happé, 1994). This assesses the ability to interpret a nonliteral statement. Relative to normal controls who were IQ and age-matched, individuals with autism or Asperger syndrome performed less well on the task, while ...

Kanner opens his pioneering 1943 paper on autism by making a mysterious mention of the year 1938. Recent letters to the editor of this journal have disagreed over a particular interpretation-does 1938 refer to an early paper by Asperger, effectively meaning Kanner plagiarised Asperger? I argue 1938 refers to a paper by Louise Despert. This was not plagiarism but a case of building on Despert's ...

Previous work suggests children with autism show superior performance (in relation to their general mental age) on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). Frith interprets this as showing that they have "weak central coherence". In Experiment 1, using an adult level version of this task, we aimed to replicate and extend this finding, first, by collecting response time (RT) data; second, by testing adu...

Using the Swedish Medical Birth Registry (MBR), obstetrical and demographic information was retrieved for 250 children with autism or Asperger syndrome who were born in Malmoe, Sweden, and enrolled at the local Child and Youth Habilitation Center. The reference group consisted of all children born in Malmoe during 1980-2005. Obstetric sub-optimality (prematurity, low Apgar scores, growth restri...