Linking metaphor comprehension with analogical reasoning: Evidence from typical development and autism spectrum disorder

We examined the relationship between metaphor comprehension and verbal analogical reasoning in young adults who were either typically developing (TD) or diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The ASD sample was highly educated and high in verbal ability, and closely matched to a subset of TD participants on age, gender, educational background, and verbal ability. Additional TD participants with a broader range of abilities were also tested. Each participant solved sets of verbal analogies and metaphors in verification formats, allowing measurement of both accuracy and reaction times. Measures of individual differences in vocabulary, verbal working memory, and autistic traits were also obtained. Accuracy for both the verbal analogy and the metaphor task was very similar across the ASD and matched TD groups. However, reaction times on both tasks were longer for the ASD group. Additionally, stronger correlations between verbal analogical reasoning and working memory capacity in the ASD group indicated that processing verbal analogies was more effortful for them. In the case of both groups, accuracy on the metaphor and analogy tasks was correlated. A mediation analysis revealed that after controlling for working memory capacity, the inter-task correlation could be accounted for by the mediating variable of vocabulary knowledge, suggesting that the primary common mechanisms linking the two tasks involve language skills.     

The Valley task: Understanding intention from goal‐directed motion in typical development and autism

A novel paradigm investigates the ability to understand an agent's intended goal in children with autism (N = 25), typically developing children (N = 46), and adults (N = 16+12) by watching a non‐human agent's kinematic properties alone. Computer animations depict a circle at the bottom of a U‐shaped valley rolling up and down its slopes and getting closer to a target resting at the top of either side of the valley. The circle's persistent motion and improving attempts evoke the attribution of the intention to reach the target, regardless of whether the circle fails or attains its goal. Children with autism are as able as controls to infer an agent's intended‐goal, disregarding its failure to reach the target. In addition, the study showed that the perception of persistent motion is a sufficient but not a necessary cue for very young children and children with autisn to attribute intention to an agent, whereas adults consider the persistent motion cue as a sufficient and necessary cue to attribute intention to an agent.     

Exploring face perception in disorders of development: Evidence from Williams syndrome and autism

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) and autism are characterized by different social phenotypes but have been said to show similar atypicalities of face‐processing style. Although the structural encoding of faces may be similarly atypical in these two developmental disorders, there are clear differences in overall face skills. The inclusion of both populations in the same study can address how the profile of face skills varies across disorders. The current paper explored the processing of identity, eye‐gaze, lip‐reading, and expressions of emotion using the same participants across face domains. The tasks had previously been used to make claims of a modular structure to face perception in typical development. Participants with WS (N=15) and autism (N=20) could be dissociated from each other, and from individuals with general developmental delay, in the domains of eye‐gaze and expression processing. Individuals with WS were stronger at these skills than individuals with autism. Even if the structural encoding of faces appears similarly atypical in these groups, the overall profile of face skills, as well as the underlying architecture of face perception, varies greatly. The research provides insights into typical and atypical models of face perception in WS and autism.     

The different representational frameworks underpinning abstract and concrete knowledge: Evidence from odd-one-out judgements

Recent evidence from neuropsychological investigations of individuals with global aphasia and deep or deep-phonological dyslexia suggests that abstract and concrete concepts are underpinned by qualitatively different representational frameworks. Abstract words are represented primarily by their association to other words, whilst concrete words are represented primarily by their taxonomic similarity to one another. In the current study, we present the first evidence for this association/similarity distinction to be gathered from healthy research participants. Using a semantic odd-one-out task, it is shown that normal participants identify associative connections more quickly than similarity-based connections when processing abstract words, but that the pattern is reversed for concrete words. It is also demonstrated that the typical concrete-word advantage observed in many cognitive tasks is abolished and even reversed when participants have to comprehend the semantic associations between words. The data provide converging evidence for the different representational frameworks hypothesis and suggest that claims based on information from previous neuropsychological investigations can be generalized to normal cognition.     

Representing intentions in self and other: studies of autism and typical development

Two experiments were conducted to explore the extent to which individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as well as young typically developing (TD) children, are explicitly aware of their own and others’ intentions. In Experiment 1, participants with ASD were significantly less likely than age‐ and ability‐matched comparison participants to correctly recognize their own knee‐jerk reflex movements as unintentional. Performance on this knee‐jerk task was associated with performance on measures of false belief understanding, independent of age and verbal ability, in both participants with ASD and TD children. In Experiment 2, participants with ASD were significantly less able than comparison participants to correctly recognize their own or another person’s mistaken actions as unintended, in a ‘Transparent Intentions’ task ( Russell & Hill, 2001 ; Russell, Hill & Franco, 2001 ). Performance on aspects of the Transparent Intentions task was associated with performance on measures of false belief understanding, independent of age and verbal ability, in both participants with ASD and TD children. This study suggests that individuals with ASD have a diminished awareness of their own and others’ intentions and that this diminution is associated with other impairments in theory of mind.     

Imitation from 12 to 24 months in autism and typical development: a longitudinal Rasch analysis

The development of imitation during the second year of life plays an important role in domains of sociocognitive development such as language and social learning. Deficits in imitation ability in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from toddlerhood into adulthood have also been repeatedly documented, raising the possibility that early disruptions in imitation contribute to the onset of ASD and the deficits in language and social interaction that define the disorder. This study prospectively examined the development of imitation between 12 and 24 months of age in 154 infants at familial risk for ASD and 78 typically developing infants who were all later assessed at 36 months for ASD or other developmental delays. The study established a developmental measure of imitation ability and examined group differences over time, using an analytic Rasch measurement model. Results revealed a unidimensional latent construct of imitation and verified a reliable sequence of imitation skills that was invariant over time for all outcome groups. Results also showed that all groups displayed similar significant linear increases in imitation ability between 12 and 24 months and that these increases were related to individual growth in both expressive language and ratings of social engagement but not in fine motor development. The group of children who developed ASD by age 3 years exhibited delayed imitation development compared with the low-risk typical outcome group across all time-points, but were indistinguishable from other high-risk infants who showed other cognitive delays not related to ASD.     

Intentions vs. resemblance: Understanding pictures in typical development and autism

Research has debated whether children reflect on artists’ intentions when comprehending pictures, or instead derive meaning entirely from resemblance. We explore these hypotheses by comparing how typically developing toddlers and low-functioning children with autism (a population impaired in intentional reasoning) interpret abstract pictures. In Experiment 1, both groups mapped familiar object names onto abstract pictures, however, they related the same representations to different 3-D referents. Toddlers linked abstract pictures with intended referents they did not resemble, while children with autism mapped picture-referent relations based on resemblance. Experiment 2 showed that toddlers do not rely upon linguistic cues to determine intended referential relations. Experiment 3 confirmed that the responding of children with autism was not due to perseveration or associative word learning, and also provided independent evidence of their intention-reading difficulties. We argue that typically developing children derive meaning from the social-communicative intentions underlying pictures when resemblance is an inadequate cue to meaning. By contrast, children with autism do not reflect on artists’ intentions and simply relate pictures to whatever they happen to resemble.     

The decontextualization of form and function in the development of pretence

Through the process of decontextualization, the behaviours and objects used in children's pretence become increasingly detached from their real‐life contexts and uses ( Flavell, 1985 ). However, whilst age‐related changes in children's pretence have been reasonably well documented, the relationship between the decontextualization of form and function has yet to be established and the relationship between pretence using substitute objects and pretence without substitute objects remains unclear. To address these issues, 3–8‐year‐old typically developing children (N =84) were shown a series of pretend actions, like writing, enacted at various levels of decontextualization. Children's understanding of each action was assessed. The results revealed three main findings. First, form and function are both equally important in children's comprehension of object substitution pretence. Second, children find actions enacted using substitute objects that are similar to the referent in terms of both their form and function easier to interpret than those performed using decontextualized props – including body‐part‐as‐object (BPO) and imaginary object (IO) gestures – regardless of age. Finally, BPO and IO gestures are of equal complexity and children 5 years and above correctly interpret these gestures more readily than actions involving substitute objects that share no similarity with the referent. These findings are discussed in relation to dual and triune representation problems ( DeLoache, 1995 ; Tomasello, Striano, & Rochat, 1999 ).     

Self-referential memory in autism spectrum disorder and typical development: Exploring the ownership effect

Owned objects occupy a privileged cognitive processing status and are viewed almost as extensions of the self. It has been demonstrated that items over which a sense of ownership is felt will be better remembered than other items (an example of the “self-reference effect”). As autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by an a typical self-concept, people with ASD may not demonstrate this “ownership effect”. Two experiments were conducted which replicate and extend Cunningham, Turk, MacDonald, and Macrae (2008). In Experiment 1, neurotypical adults completed a card sorting task and cards belonging to the ‘self’ were better remembered than cards belonging to another person. In Experiment 2, adults with ASD recalled self- and other owned items equally well. These results shed light both on the relation between sense of self and the ownership effect, and the nature of the self-concept in ASD.     

On the representational systems underlying prospection: Evidence from the event-cueing paradigm

The ability to think about the future-prospection-is central to many aspects of human cognition and behavior, from planning and decision making, to self-control and the construction of a sense of identity. Yet, the exact nature of the representational systems underlying prospection is not fully understood. Recent findings point to the critical role of episodic memory in imagining specific future events, but it is unlikely that prospection depends solely on this system. Using an event-cueing paradigm in two studies, we here show that specific events that people imagine might happen in their personal future are commonly embedded in broader event sequences-termed event clusters-that link a set of envisioned events according to causal and thematic relations. These findings provide novel evidence that prospection relies on multiple representational systems, with general autobiographical knowledge structures providing a frame that organizes imagined events in overarching event sequences. The results further suggest that knowledge about personal goals plays an important role in structuring these event sequences, especially for the distant future.     

内隐序列学习表征机制探究：眼动证据

内隐序列学习的表征机制是内隐学习研究领域的基本问题, 还存在争议。采用眼动追踪技术, 通过3个实验探讨内隐序列学习的表征机制。结果发现, 知觉序列混合眼跳和反应序列混合眼跳条件下发生序列学习; 朝向眼跳和反向眼跳条件下发生序列学习; 有、无分心反向眼跳下发生序列学习, 两者序列学习量差异不显著。整个研究表明, 内隐序列学习的表征依赖于序列信息。     

The development of numerical estimation: evidence against a representational shift

How do our mental representations of number change over development? The dominant view holds that children (and adults) possess multiple representations of number, and that age and experience lead to a shift from greater reliance upon logarithmically organized number representations to greater reliance upon more accurate, linear representations. Here we present a new theoretically motivated and empirically supported account of the development of numerical estimation, based on the idea that number‐line estimation tasks entail judgments of proportion. We extend existing models of perceptual proportion judgment to the case of abstract numerical magnitude. Two experiments provide support for these models; three likely sources of developmental change in children’s estimation performance are identified and discussed. This work demonstrates that proportion‐judgment models provide a unified account of estimation patterns that have previously been explained in terms of a developmental shift from logarithmic to linear representations of number.     

The association between past and future oriented thinking: Evidence from autism spectrum disorder

A number of recently developed theories (e.g., the constructive episodic simulation, self-projection, and scene construction hypotheses) propose that the ability to simulate possible future events (sometimes referred to as episodic future thinking, prospection, or foresight) depends on the same neurocognitive system that is implicated in the recall of past events (episodic memory). In this paper, we argue that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) offers an ideal test of such theories, given that it is a developmental disorder that is characterized by impairments in episodic memory. Each of these theories would predict concomitant impairments in episodic future thinking among individuals with ASD. We review evidence concerning episodic future thinking in ASD, as well as studies of prospective memory (remembering to do something in the future), planning, navigation, and theory of mind, which some theories suggest also rely on the same mechanism as episodic future thinking.     

Joint roles of parenting and nutritional status for child development: Evidence from rural Cambodia

Substantial work has demonstrated that early nutrition and home environments, including the degree to which children receive cognitive stimulation and emotional support from parents, play a profound role in influencing early childhood development. Yet, less work has documented the joint influences of parenting and nutritional status on child development among children in the preschool years living in low‐income countries. Using panel data from 2016 to 2017 on the parenting, nutritional status, and early developmental outcomes (executive function, language, early numeracy, and socioemotional problems) of 6,508 Cambodian children ages 3–5 years, our findings demonstrate that inequities in early development associated with family wealth are evident at age 3 and increase among children ages 4 and 5 years. Using hierarchical regression analysis, a significant share of these inequalities is explained by differences in parenting and early nutritional status, measured by stunting. Better‐educated parents engage in more stimulating and supportive parenting practices. However, the positive association between parenting and language and early numeracy outcomes is 35–54% stronger for non‐stunted children, and parental activities explain only about 8–14% of the cognitive gap between the lowest and highest wealth quintiles. The results highlight the need for additional research outlining interactions between environmental factors that link family wealth and child development.     

The development of representational insight: beyond the model/room paradigm

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether very young children have difficulty with dual representations when change in perspective has been eliminated, that is, the task no longer requires transfer between a traversable and surveyable array. In a preliminary experiment children 30 and 36 months of age attempted to transfer an action observed with one of four tools associated with a child-size workbench to a miniature replica of that workbench or vice versa. Children at both ages exhibited limited success on both transfer and memory trials; the demands of selecting a tool and transferring the appropriate imitative response were hypothesized to exceed their processing capacity. A second experiment using an object-retrieval procedure involving the two workbenches revealed successful transfer by 36-month-olds, but not 30-month-olds. The results confirm that limitations in dual representation extend to contexts other than the room and model of the room paradigm where spatial perspective differs. The results are discussed in terms of procedures that support or interfere with children’s ability to demonstrate symbolic insight.     

Developmental change in early representational intelligence: Evidence from spatial classification strategies and related verbal expressions

The procedures 1- to 3-year-old children use to group simple sets of objects are analyzed in an investigation of cognitive change in early representational intelligence. Forty children spontaneously manipulated two-class arrays and participated in two experimental probes of object grouping. Children 1 to 2 years of age group classes by looking for one kind of thing at a time. Consistent with this, they verbally mark single classes. Children from $\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}$ to 3 years old employ spatial grouping procedures that require simultaneous consideration of two classes, and they refer to relations between classes. Advances made during the second year are consistent with other initial signs of representational-symbolic intelligence. The advances in the third year are unaccounted for by traditional cognitive-developmental theories, but they are congruent with late-emerging patterns in natural representational systems such as language, suggesting the presence of broad changes in mental organization shortly after the onset of representational intelligence.     

回合式教学法的有效学习：来自自闭症儿童职前教师的证据

使用异步培训技术自主学习循证教育干预方法,或可帮助自闭症儿童职前教师应对新时代自闭症儿童融合教育高质量发展带来的挑战。采用3个实验探究了自闭症儿童职前教师在3种学习材料呈现方式下对回合式教学法的自主学习效果。结果发现,学习材料呈现方式对自闭症儿童职前教师自主学习回合式教学法的效果有显著影响：“字幕+画面+声音解说”组成的视听双通道材料——真实教学视频下的学习效果最好,“文本+图像”组成的PPT材料比同属视觉单通道材料的Word文本更有优势。结果表明,无论是在知识层面的学习(实验1、2和3),还是在实操层面的忠诚度提升(实验3),学习内容以视听双通道方式呈现时,自闭症儿童职前教师的自主学习效果最好。     

Atypical shape bias and categorization in autism: Evidence from children and computational simulations

The shape bias, a preference for mapping new word labels onto the shape rather than the color or texture of referents, has been postulated as a word‐learning mechanism. Previous research has shown deficits in the shape bias in children with autism even though they acquire sizeable lexicons. While previous explanations have suggested the atypical use of color for label extension in individuals with autism, we hypothesize an atypical mapping of novel labels to novel objects, regardless of the physical properties of the objects. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate this phenomenon in some individuals with autism, but the novelty of objects only partially explains their lack of shape bias. In a second experiment, we present a computational model that provides a developmental account of the shape bias in typically developing children and in those with autism. This model is based on theories of neurological dysfunctions in autism, and it integrates theoretical and empirical findings in the literature of categorization, word learning, and the shape bias. The model replicates the pattern of results of our first experiment and shows how individuals with autism are more likely to categorize experimental objects together on the basis of their novelty. It also provides insights into possible mechanisms by which children with autism learn new words, and why their word referents may be idiosyncratic. Our model highlights a developmental approach to autism that emphasizes deficient representations of categories underlying an impaired shape bias.     

Embedded figures detection in autism and typical development: preliminary evidence of a double dissociation in relationships with visual search

Individuals with autism show relatively strong performance on tasks that require them to identify the constituent parts of a visual stimulus. This is assumed to be the result of a bias towards processing the local elements in a display that follows from a weakened ability to integrate information at the global level. The results of the current study showed that, among children with autism, ability to locate a figure embedded in a larger stimulus was only related to performance on visual search trials where the target was identified by a unique perceptual feature. In contrast, control children's embedded figures performance was specifically related to their performance on visual search trials where the target was defined by a conjunction of features. This double dissociation suggests that enhanced performance on perceptual tasks by children with autism is not simply a consequence of a quantitative difference in ability to engage in global processing.     

Interaction and representational integration: evidence from speech errors

We examine the mechanisms that support interaction between lexical, phonological and phonetic processes during language production. Studies of the phonetics of speech errors have provided evidence that partially activated lexical and phonological representations influence phonetic processing. We examine how these interactive effects are modulated by lexical frequency. Previous research has demonstrated that during lexical access, the processing of high frequency words is facilitated; in contrast, during phonetic encoding, the properties of low frequency words are enhanced. These contrasting effects provide the opportunity to distinguish two theoretical perspectives on how interaction between processing levels can be increased. A theory in which cascading activation is used to increase interaction predicts that the facilitation of high frequency words will enhance their influence on the phonetic properties of speech errors. Alternatively, if interaction is increased by integrating levels of representation, the phonetics of speech errors will reflect the retrieval of enhanced phonetic properties for low frequency words. Utilizing a novel statistical analysis method, we show that in experimentally induced speech errors low lexical frequency targets and outcomes exhibit enhanced phonetic processing. We sketch an interactive model of lexical, phonological and phonetic processing that accounts for the conflicting effects of lexical frequency on lexical access and phonetic processing.