7 research outputs found
Harnessing repetitive behaviours to engage attention and learning in a novel therapy for autism: an exploratory analysis
No full textRigorous, quantitative examination of therapeutic techniques anecdotally reported to have been successful in people with autism who lack communicative speech will help guide basic science toward a more complete characterisation of the cognitive profile in this underserved subpopulation, and show the extent to which theories and results developed with the high-functioning subpopulation may apply. This study examines a novel therapy, the "Rapid Prompting Method" (RPM). RPM is a parent-developed communicative and educational therapy for persons with autism who do not speak or who have difficulty using speech communicatively.The technique aims to develop a means of interactive learning by pointing amongst multiple-choice options presented at different locations in space, with the aid of sensory "prompts" which evoke a response without cueing any specific response option. The prompts are meant to draw and to maintain attention to the communicative task–making the communicative and educational content coincident with the most physically salient, attention-capturing stimulus – and to extinguish the sensory–motor preoccupations with which the prompts compete.ideo-recorded RPM sessions with nine autistic children ages 8–14years who lacked functional communicative speech were coded for behaviours of interest
Emergent Relationships Between Empathizing And Systemizing Skills In Autistic And Typical Development
No full textEmpathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory attempts to explain individual cognitive variation in terms of an extrapolation of the autism spectrum. In this view, autism is an extreme version of the human brain in terms of its "male-ness," the prototypical male brain being organized - via prenatal androgen exposure - for 'systemizing,' or detail-oriented, observation-based, 'lawful, finite, and deterministic' rule-making. The 'extreme female brain,' by contrast, is organized for 'empathizing,' the ability to accurately attribute intentionality to others. The full range of these attributes constitutes the E-S spectrum, within which the general population is normally distributed. E-S theory helps explain individual and sex differences with real world importance, such as the social idiosyncrasies characterizing many individuals in systemizing fields (e.g., engineering, computer science) and the underrepresentation of women in STEM. Implicit in E-S theory is the assumption that empathizing and systemizing domains co-vary; that social tradeoffs come with a detail-oriented cognitive "style". This assumption is recognizable in the longstanding search for singular causes of autism that will explain social and non-social symptoms; and in everyday presumptions about the social skills of individuals excelling in numerical and spatial domains. We begin with an overview of the E-S covariance literature and the three works comprising this dissertation, followed by individual chapters discussing each work in depth. The first is an empirical investigation indicating that E-S co-variance assumptions apply more to males than females, in whom the two domains are orthogonal. These sex- dependent patterns extend to college major, suggesting an ability breadth alternative to the absolute ability account of female STEM underrepresentation. The second reviews cognitive sex differences studies utilizing second-to-fourth digit length ration (2D/4D) as a biomarker of prenatal testosterone exposure, and argues that the biological linchpin of E-S theory - the brain organization effects of prenatal testosterone exposure - may also be sex-dependent. The third synthesizes the literature on empathizing-systemizing co-variance across clinical, sub-clinical, and typically developing populations into a model of developmentally emergent E-S co-variance. In each case co-variance assumptions are confirmed and challenged, providing novel insights about typical and autistic development. In the concluding chapter this model is used to account for the findings of the first two works, and future empirical directions are suggested based on the collective insights of all three works
Harnessing repetitive behaviours to engage attention and learning in a novel therapy for autism:An exploratory analysis
No full textRigorous, quantitative examination of therapeutic techniques anecdotally reported to have been successful in people with autism who lack communicative speech will help guide basic science towards a more complete characterisation of the cognitive profile in this underserved subpopulation, and show the extent to which theories and results developed with the high-functioning subpopulation may apply. This study examines a novel therapy, the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). RPM is a parent-developed communicative and educational therapy for persons with autism who do not speak or who have difficulty using speech communicatively. The technique aims to develop a means of interactive learning by pointing amongst multiple choice options presented at different locations in space, with the aid of sensory prompts which evoke a response without cueing any specific response option. The prompts are meant to draw and to maintain attention to the communicative task – making the communicative and educational content co-incident with the most physically salient, attention-capturing stimulus – and to extinguish the sensory-motor preoccupations with which the prompts compete. Video-recorded RPM sessions with 9 autistic children ages 8 to 14 years who lacked functional communicative speech were coded for behaviours of interest. An analysis controlled for age indicates that exposure to the claimed therapy appears to support a decrease in repetitive behaviours and an increase in the number of multiple-choice response options without any decrease in successful responding. Direct gaze is not related to successful responding, suggesting that direct gaze might not be any advantage for this population and need not in all cases be a precondition to communication therapies
Social cognition in intellectually disabled male criminal offenders: a deficit in affect perception?
No full text
Purpose
Although intellectual disability (ID) and criminal offending have long been associated, the nature of this link is obfuscated by reliance on historically unrigorous means of assessing ID and fractionating social cognitive skills. The purpose of this paper is to review and report current findings and set an agenda for future research in social perception, social inference and social problem solving in ID violent offenders.
Design/methodology/approach
The literature is reviewed on comorbidity of criminal offending and ID, and on social cognitive impairment and ID offending. In an exploratory case-control series comprising six violent offenders with ID and five similarly able controls, emotion recognition and social inference are assessed by the Awareness of Social Inference Test and social problem-solving ability and style by an adapted Social Problem-Solving Inventory.
Findings
Violent offenders recognised all emotions except “anxious”. Further, while offenders could interpret and integrate wider contextual cues, absent such cues offenders were less able to use paralinguistic cues (e.g. emotional tone) to infer speakers’ feelings. Offenders in this sample exceeded controls’ social problem-solving scores.
Originality/value
This paper confirms that ID offenders, like neurotypical offenders, display specific deficits in emotion recognition – particularly fear recognition – but suggests that in ID offenders impairments of affect perception are not necessarily accompanied by impaired social problem solving. The implication for therapeutic practice is that ID offenders might be most effectively rehabilitated by targeting simpler, low-level cognitive processes, such as fear perception, rather than adapting treatment strategies from mainstream offenders.
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The role of bone marrow derived cells in cardiac repair
No full textPhDCurrent pharmacological therapies fail to address the final end-point of cardiac
ischaemia — the death and dysfunction of cardiomyocytes. Advances in stem
cell biology have provided hope, for the first time, of addressing this underlying
pathology. The work performed here was designed to further understanding
of the mechanisms by which bone marrow derived cells improve damaged myocardium.
In situ hybridisation was used to detect sex chromosomes within ex-planted,
human, sex-mismatch hearts. Host derived cells were found at low frequency in
donor hearts, suggesting ongoing post-natal cardiac tissue repair.
Human mesenchymal stem cells were examined in vitro and in a rat model
of ischaemia-reperfusion injury. Cardiomyocytes were not formed when cultured
with either 5-azacytidine or ascorbic acid, and the cells failed to home to the ischaemic
heart or improve cardiac function.
In the same model, rat mononuclear cells significantly reduced infarct size
when administered immediately upon reperfusion. Cells were rarely identified
within the myocardium. No functional improvement was seen acutely, but at
seven days cardiac function had improved. The low frequency of cells retained
in the heart suggested that a process other than transdifferentiation accounted
for the observations.
Hence, evidence for paracrine actions was sought. In the same model, apoptosis
and necrosis in cardiomyocytes were found to be significantly reduced.
Western blots demonstrated activation of the reperfusion salvage kinase pathway,
analogous to that seen in ischaemic pre- and post-conditioning. Blocking
this pathway abolished the infarct size reduction. Global proteomic analysis confirmed
alterations in protein expression consistent with known cardioprotective
pathways.
In conclusion, endogenous myocardial repair processes are inadequate to
compensate for pathological insults. Supplementation with mononuclear cells in
an ischaemia-reperfusion model produced significant benefit to infarct size and
cardiac function. The mechanism of benefit appears to be induced by paracrine
effects activating pro-survival pathways.British Heart Foundatio
«¿Cuál es la edad mejor para el poeta?»: discursos sobre la edad en tiempos de Cervantes y Lope de Vega
No full textSeventeenth Century writers and poets exploited the discourses on age, which early modern humanists inherited from Antiquity, reworking at their convenience theories about natural wit, the value of experience, or humoral constitution, to propound an image of the ideal author favoring their own literary careers. This article examines the confronted and shifting discourses on age by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and their contemporaries, considering them as strategies to claim centrality in the literary field, in line with a hard-fought concept of the genuine author.Los escritores y poetas del seiscientos instrumentalizaron los discursos sobre la edad, retomados de la antigüedad por los humanistas en la modernidad temprana, reelaborando a su conveniencia las doctrinas sobre el ingenio natural, el valor de la experiencia o la constitución humoral, para proponer una figura del autor ideal que privilegiara sus propias carreras literarias. Este artículo analiza los discursos confrontados y cambiantes sobre la edad en Cervantes, Lope de Vega y sus contemporáneos como estrategias para reclamar la centralidad en el campo literario según un disputado concepto sobre el autor genuino
