Andrew Grayson

Moral understanding in children with autism

Children with autism were compared with control groups on their ability to make moral judgements. Participants were presented with pairs of vignettes in which actions were either deliberate or accidental and caused injury to a person or damage to property. Participants were asked to judge which protagonist was the naughtier and to verbally justify this judgement. Results showed that the children with autism were as likely as controls to judge culpability on the basis of motive, and to judge injury to persons as more culpable than damage to property. Children with autism also offered some appropriate verbal justifications for their judgments although most justifications were of poor quality and reiterated the story. Results are discussed in terms of theory of mind and the possible role of deficits in complex reasoning and executive functions.

Inhibition, ADHD, and computer games: the inhibitory performance of children with ADHD on computerized tasks and games.

Contrary to empirical reports of inhibitory dysfunction in ADHD, parental reports suggest that when playing computer games, the inhibitory abilities of children with ADHD are unimpaired. This small-scale preliminary investigation into this phenomenon looks at inhibition of an ongoing response and activity exhibited by children with ADHD between 6 and 14 years old on two commercially available games, on the Connerss Continuous Performance Test II (CPT II), and on a more game-like version of the same task that incorporates characteristics commonly found in commercially available computer games. The performance of participants with ADHD on commercially available games is equivalent to that of typically developing participants and is significantly better on the more game-like version of the CPT II.

Identifying barriers to help-seeking: a qualitative analysis of students' preparedness to seek help from tutors

Abstract A qualitative study based on the first-hand accounts of students in higher education was conducted Participants were encouraged to explain, in their own terms, their own help-seeking behaviour. The focus for their explanations was ‘help-seeking from academic staff’. The aim of the study was to construct a culturally sensitive account of barriers to help-seeking in a student population. The discussion focuses on how studies of this kind might complement and extend what is already known about help-seeking m the extant literature.

Can't or won't? Evidence relating to authorship in facilitated communication

Most experimental evaluations of Facilitated Communication (FC) provide no evidence that this technique is valid. Important as they are, controlled test-based studies have characteristically not done justice to the complexity of the issues which surround FC. This paper summarises a long term evaluation project involving various forms of data collection. In this study too, controlled testing has shown very little evidence for the validity of the technique. In contrast, other sources of data, including records of naturally occurring message passing and intensive video analysis have provided evidence that the communication skills of some FC users have been enhanced. An overview of the project is presented, and discussed in relation to the blurring of findings (observations of behaviour) and inferences (judgements of communicative competence) in the extant literature.

Hidden communicative competence: Case study evidence using eye-tracking and video analysis:

A facilitated communication (FC) user with an autism spectrum disorder produced sophisticated texts by pointing, with physical support, to letters on a letterboard while their eyes were tracked and while their pointing movements were video recorded. This FC user has virtually no independent means of expression, and is held to have no literacy skills. The resulting data were subjected to a variety of analyses aimed at describing the relationship between the FC user’s looking and pointing behaviours, in order to make inferences about the complex question of ‘authorship’. The eye-tracking data present a challenge to traditional ‘facilitator influence’ accounts of authorship, and are consistent with the proposition that this FC user does indeed author the sophisticated texts that are attributed to him; he looks for longer at to-be-typed letters before typing them, and looks ahead to subsequent letters of words before the next letter of the word is typed.

Combining eye tracking and conventional techniques for indications of user-adaptability

We have captured and analysed users’ eye movements by means of an eye-tracking device to re-visit existing web design guidelines. The study reported here examines how quickly users adapt to an unfamiliar design layout and, in particular, how quickly they adjust their expectations of where to look for a given target link during repeated exposures to a new layout. Eye movement-based metrics such as time to target fixation, location of first fixation and scan path (sequence of fixations) were applied to capture users’ eye movements. These metrics were then applied to analyse the effects of repeated exposures and of design layouts of websites. More exposures led to decreased time to target fixation, indicating that user-adaptation occurred. The visual characteristics of the target link also influenced visual search behaviour. Qualitative complementary data such as the users’ frequency and purpose of internet usage, users’ expectations about the target link added value to the eye-movement data.

Using Tests of False Belief with Children with Autism: How Valid and Reliable are they?

Twenty-two children with autism were given four tests of false belief understanding: the Sally-Anne task, two variants of the deceptive box task, and the three boxes task. The overall consistency of the children’s performance was high, 77 percent of the participants either passing or failing all of the tasks. The convergent validity (across-task consistency) of the deceptive box and the three boxes paradigms was high, and the convergent validity of the three boxes and Sally-Anne tasks was also acceptable. However, a weaker level of convergent validity was found for the deceptive box and Sally-Anne tasks, suggesting that these paradigms test slightly different aspects of cognition. The reliability (within-child consistency) of the children’s performances across two versions of the deceptive box task was high. These findings are discussed in terms of their practical implications for practitioners and researchers.

Revisiting Web Design Guidelines by Exploring Users’ Expectations, Preferences and Visual Search Behaviour

The majority of existing Web design guidelines have been derived by expert heuristic evaluations, apparently without involving the users themselves. In this paper we report two studies of an on-going research programme in the area of eye tracking in which we are investigating the relationship between the users’ expectations, preferences, and visual search behaviour. The first study captures the position of first fixations while the users look for cues of the brand identity and services of the site. The second study examines how quickly users adapt to an unfamiliar design layout during repeated exposures by measuring the position of first fixation, time to target fixation and sequence of fixations (scan path). In both the studies, the eye tracking data is supported by qualitative data from pre- and post-session questions which elicited the users’ expectations and preferences about the target Web-link.

A prospective study of crying during the first year of infancy

Abstract Mothers of ‘crying’ infants, who reported excessive crying before 3 months of age, together with mothers of matched controls who did not, were interviewed using the Crying Patterns Questionnaire (CPQ) at infant ages 4 months, 8 months, and 12 months. By 4 months of age daily amounts of crying for both groups had fallen significantly. ‘Crying’ group infants were reported to cry significantly more than controls for the whole of their first year. Both groups cried somewhat less at 12 months than at 4 months, although these age differences were found to be statistically nonsignificant. The pattern of infant crying across the day was also analysed and found to be similar for both groups. Reported hourly crying rates increased during the afternoon and evening, with morning and night-time being the periods of least crying. Closer analysis of the pattern of crying across the day suggested that further investigation of crying peaks within the afternoon and evening may be worthwhile. Overall, the study sug...

Evaluation of Facilitated Communication

Two case studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of Facilitated Communication (FC). A wide variety of sources of data have been examined and consistent behaviour found within FC interactions. There are indications that changes in behaviour of both people resulted at least in part from the use of FC.