Embracing the challenge of bold theories of autism

This article is a commentary on ‘Fetal testosterone and autistic traits’ ( Auyeung et al., 2009 ).     

Tracking of spatial information in narratives

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the process by which location information in narratives is represented in memory and the nature of the resulting memory representation. In Experiments 1 and 2, the results of a recognition task demonstrated that location shifts led to an immediate decrease in the accessibility in memory of protagonists' former locations. In Experiment 3, regardless of the amount of backgrounding after the last mention of the critical location ("the forest"), reference to an implied, location-typical entity ("the trees") was read equally fast as long as the protagonist remained in that location. In contrast to previous findings, we conclude that when location information is salient in a narrative it is included in readers' situation models, being updated immediately and remaining highly accessible even several sentences after it was last mentioned.     

Diagnosing Autism using ICD-10 criteria: A comparison of neural networks and standard multivariate procedures

In a sample of 976 consecutive cases derived from the recent world-wide Field Trial of Autism and other Pervasive Developmental Disorders, we tested the accuracy of the 15 ICD-10 criteria for the diagnosis of Autism, by comparing neural network models (NN) to more conventional multivariate competitors, namely, linear and quadratic discriminant function analyses and logistic regression. NNs were less accurate than competitors, both in terms of cross-validation results as well as in levels of shrinkage from training to test conditions. The clinical research implications of these results are discussed.     

When story characters communicate: readers’ representations of characters’ linguistic exchanges

Klin, Ralano, and Weingartner (2007) found transfer effects when a phrase, described as part of a note one character had left for another, was repeated across two passages. However, when the phrase was part of a note in story A and part of a conversation in story B, transfer effects were eliminated (Klin & Drumm, 2010). Klin and Drumm concluded that readers encoded the perceptual features of story characters’ linguistic exchanges and that the mismatch (visual vs. auditory) eliminated transfer effects. The present experiments support this conclusion and also demonstrate that readers encode details of the social interaction that surrounds the characters’ linguistic exchanges: Effects were reduced when the phrase in story A was part of a direct social interaction between the characters (e.g., phone conversation), whereas in story B, the interaction was indirect (e.g., voicemail). More generally, readers are exquisitely tuned to subtle aspects of characters’ linguistic exchanges.