TREATING TOTAL LIQUID REFUSAL WITH BACKWARD CHAINING AND FADING

In this study, we report on a 12-year-old boy with autism, mental retardation, and a history of severe gastrointestinal problems who presented with total liquid and food refusal. Backward chaining was used to shape drinking from a cup, and a fading procedure was used to increase the quantity of water he was required to drink.     

Are autistic traits autistic?

According to the extreme male brain theory of autism ( Baron‐Cohen, 2002 ), autistic traits would be extreme manifestations of typical male behaviours. The Auyeung et al. (2009) paper establishes a link between autistic traits and higher fetal testosterone (fT) levels in typically developing children. We argue that the construct behind this relationship needs further investigation. First, the link between fT levels and sexually dimorphic traits, that are for example, associated with empathizing and systemizing, is controversial. Likewise, describing autistic behaviours as being extreme male‐like is debatable. The cerebral hemisphere laterality pattern of individuals with autism also seems to differ from the pattern typically observed in males. Moreover, the parallel that should exist, according to the fT theory, between individuals with autism and individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), because of their high fT levels, is unclear. The theory implying fT levels in autism fails to account for a big part of autism, and the link between fT and normal ‘autistic traits’ hardly demonstrates the causal link between fT and autism.     

Working memory load and its impact on space-based and motion-based stimulus-response correspondence (SRC) effects

ABSTRACT

If spatial stimulus-response correspondence (SRC) effect results from automatic processes, cognitive load should not affect this effect. However, if spatial SRC effect is based on the interference of cognitive codes, cognitive load should influence it. Furthermore, the motion-based SRC effect should be affected by the cognitive load, as this SRC effect is related to the cognitive codes interference. In this study, participants performed combined tasks for space-based and motion-based SRC effects without working memory load (WML), or under spatial and verbal WML to see if cognitive load affects both SRC effects or just one. Results demonstrated that space-based SRC remained intact from WML, while the motion-based SRC was influenced by WML, although only in limited degree. This supports the notion that automatic processes underlie space-based SRC effect, whereas the motion-based SRC effect is related to cognitive codes interference, but the latter requires further investigation.