1,720,971 research outputs found
The Valley task: Understanding intention from goal-directed motion in typical development and autism
No full textUnderstanding emotions from standardized facial expressions in autism and normal development.
No full textTheory of Mind
No full textTheory of Mind (ToM) is a term coined to describe people's effortless propensity to search for intentions behind actions. ToM research began with primates in 1978 and continues in humans to investigate both the developmental stages of skills involving the ability to understand other's mental states − infants (7 months old) compute other's beliefs − and its brain basis. Research on ToM has always overlapped with research on autism. Findings indicate that individuals with autism have a diminished cognitive awareness of their own and others' mental states, and their brain connectivity in a multicomponents network is disrupted in different areas
The Biology of the Autistic Syndromes, 3rd Edition
No full textThe book reflects the increasing need to understand the complexity of medical findings on the bio-logical basis of the autistic syndromes. The authors provide the readers with a useful framework in which much emphasis is placed on autism as a disease with many causes and a wide range of clinical presentation
Discrete and analogue quantity processing in the parietal lobe: a functional MRI study.
No full textThe human intraparietal sulcus (IPS) is implicated in processing symbolic number information and possibly in nonsymbolic number information. Specific IPS activity for discrete quantities (numerosities) as compared with continuous, analogue quantity has not been demonstrated. Here we use a stimulus-driven paradigm to distinguish automatic estimation of "how many things" from "how much" and "how long." The discrete analogue response task (DART) uses the perception of hues which can change either abruptly (discrete, numerous stimuli) or smoothly (analogue, nonnumerous stimuli) in space or in time. Subjects decide whether they saw more green or more blue. A conjunction analysis of spatial and temporal conditions revealed that bilateral IPS was significantly more active during the processing of discrete stimuli than during analogue stimuli, as was a parietal-occipital transition zone. We suggest that processing numerosity is a distinct process from processing analogue quantity, whether extended in space or time, and that an intraparietal network connects objects' segmentation to the estimation of their numerosity
Amygdala damage impairs eye contact during conversations with real people.
No full textThe role of the human amygdala in real social interactions remains essentially unknown, although studies in nonhuman primates and studies using photographs and video in humans have shown it to be critical for emotional processing and suggest its importance for social cognition. We show here that complete amygdala lesions result in a severe reduction in direct eye contact during conversations with real people, together with an abnormal increase in gaze to the mouth. These novel findings from real social interactions are consistent with an hypothesized role for the amygdala in autism and the approach taken here opens up new directions for quantifying social behavior in human
The impact of extensive medial frontal lobe damage on 'Theory of Mind' and cognition
No full textThe ability of humans to predict and explain other people's behaviour by attributing to them independent mental states, such as desires and beliefs, is considered to be due to our ability to construct a 'Theory of Mind'. Recently, several neuroimaging studies have implicated the medial frontal lobes as playing a critical role in a dedicated 'mentalizing' or 'Theory of Mind' network in human brains. Here, we report a patient, G.T., who suffered an exceptionally rare form of stroke-bilateral anterior cerebral artery infarction, without rupture or the complications associated with anterior communicating artery aneurysms. Detailed high-resolution neuroanatomical investigations revealed extensive damage to the medial frontal lobes bilaterally, including regions identified to be critical for 'Theory of Mind' by functional neuroimaging of healthy human subjects. For the first time in such a patient, we carried out a thorough assessment of her cognitive profile including, critically, an experimental investigation of her performance on a range of tests of 'Theory of Mind'. G.T. had a dysexecutive syndrome characterized by impairments in planning and memory, as well as a tendency to confabulate. Importantly, however, she did not have any significant impairment on tasks probing her ability to construct a 'Theory of Mind', demonstrating that the extensive medial frontal regions destroyed by her stroke are not necessary for this function. These findings have important implications for the functional anatomy of 'Theory of Mind', as well as our understanding of medial frontal function. Possible reasons for the discrepancies between our results and neuroimaging studies are discussed. We conclude that our findings urge caution against using functional imaging as the sole method of establishing cognitive neuroanatomy
Movement and Mind: A Functional Imaging Study of Perception and Interpretation of Complex Intentional Movement Patterns.
No full textAutism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes.
No full textExamined brain mechanisms associated with attribution of mental states to animated shapes among 10 adults with autism or Asperger syndrome (mean age 33 yrs) and 10 normal subjects (Ss [mean age 25 yrs]). Ss were PET scanned while watching animated sequences. The animations depicted 2 triangles moving about on a screen in 3 different conditions: moving randomly, moving in a goal-directed fashion, and moving interactively with implied intentions. The last condition frequently elicited descriptions in terms of mental states that viewers attributed to the triangles (mentalizing). The autism group gave fewer and less accurate descriptions of these latter animations, but equally accurate descriptions of the other animations compared with controls. While viewing animations that elicited mentalizing, in contrast to randomly moving shapes, the normal Ss showed increased activation in a previously identified mentalizing network (medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus at the temporo-parietal junction and temporal poles). The autism group showed less activation than the normal group in all these regions. Results suggest a physiological cause for the mentalizing dysfunction in autism: a bottleneck in the interaction between higher- and lower-order perceptual processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved
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