Daniela Plesa Skwerer

Entering a community of minds: An experiential approach to "theory of mind'.

Entering a community of minds is conceptualized as a theoretical framework for understanding social cognitive development during the preschool years. This framework incorporates an experiential and social-pragmatic view of cognitive development. How language functions to advance the development of children’s understanding of the social world is a central issue within this framework. Two studies of 3- and 4-year-old children solving theory-of-mind-like problems and engaging in discourse about their responses are discussed in terms of the community of minds proposal, in particular that changes in their understanding of mental states reflect participation in discourse about social interactions within pragmatic contexts.

Social-perceptual abilities in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

People with Williams syndrome (WMS) have a unique social phenotype characterised by unusually strong interest in other people and an engaging and empathic personality. Two experiments were designed to test whether this phenotype is associated with relatively spared abilities to decode mental-state information from nonverbal cues. The first experiment involved a modified version of the revised Eyes Test. The second experiment probed the ability to label emotions from brief dynamic facial displays. Adolescents and adults with WMS were compared to age-, IQ-, and language-matched participants with learning/intellectual disabilities, and age-matched normal controls. In both experiments the WMS group performed at a significantly lower level than the normal controls, and no different from the well-matched comparison-group with intellectual disabilities. These findings, contradicting earlier reports in the literature, argue against the view that in WMS social-perceptual abilities are relatively spared and can explain the social profile associated with this neurodevelopmental disorder.

A multimeasure approach to investigating affective appraisal of social information in Williams syndrome

People with Williams syndrome (WS) have been consistently described as showing heightened sociability, gregariousness, and interest in people, in conjunction with an uneven cognitive profile and mild to moderate intellectual or learning disability. To explore the mechanisms underlying this unusual social–behavioral phenotype, we investigated whether individuals with WS show an atypical appraisal style and autonomic responsiveness to emotionally laden images with social or nonsocial content. Adolescents and adults with WS were compared to chronological age-matched and nonverbal mental age-matched groups in their responses to positive and negative images with or without social content, using measures of self-selected viewing time (SSVT), autonomic arousal reflected in pupil dilation measures, and likeability ratings. The participants with WS looked significantly longer at the social images compared to images without social content and had reduced arousal to the negative social images compared to the control groups. In contrast to the comparison groups, the explicit ratings of likeability in the WS group did not correlate with their SSVT; instead, they reflected an appraisal style of more extreme ratings. This distinctive pattern of viewing interest, likeability ratings, and autonomic arousal to images with social content in the WS group suggests that their heightened social drive may be related to atypical functioning of reward-related brain systems reflected in SSVT and autonomic reactivity measures, but not in explicit ratings.

Comparing methods for assessing receptive language skills in minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

This research addresses the challenges of assessing receptive language abilities in minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder by comparing several adapted measurement tools: a standardized direct assessment of receptive vocabulary (i.e. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4); caregiver report measures including scores on the Vineland-II Communication domain and a vocabulary questionnaire consisting of a list of words ranging from simple, developmentally early, to more advanced words expected to be understood by at least some older children and adolescents; an eye-tracking test of word comprehension, using a word–image pair matching paradigm similar to that often used in studies of infant language acquisition; and a computerized assessment using a touch screen for directly measuring word comprehension with the same stimuli used in the eye-tracking experiment. Results of this multiple-method approach revealed significant heterogeneity in receptive language abilities across participants and across assessment methods. Our findings underscore the need to find individualized approaches for capturing the potential for language comprehension of minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder who remain otherwise untestable, using several types of assessment that may include methods based on eye-tracking or touch-screen responding.

Do you have a question for me? How children with Williams syndrome respond to ambiguous referential communication during a joint activity.

Research on language in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) has been fueled by persistent theoretical controversies for two decades. These shifted from initial focus on dissociations between language and cognition functions, to examining the paradox of socio-communicative impairments despite high sociability and relatively proficient expressive language. We investigated possible sources of communicative difficulties in WS in a collaborative referential communication game. Five- to thirteen-year-old children with WS were compared to verbal mental age- and to chronological age-matched typically developing children in their ability to consider different types of information to select a speakers intended referent from an array of items. Significant group differences in attention deployment to object locations, and in the number and types of clarification requests, indicated the use of less efficient and less mature strategies for reference resolution in WS than expected based on mental age, despite learning effects similar to those of the comparison groups, shown as the game progressed.

Conducting research with minimally verbal participants with autism spectrum disorder

A growing number of research groups are now including older minimally verbal individuals with autism spectrum disorder in their studies to encompass the full range of heterogeneity in the population. There are numerous barriers that prevent researchers from collecting high-quality data from these individuals, in part because of the challenging behaviors with which they present alongside their very limited means for communication. In this article, we summarize the practices that we have developed, based on applied behavioral analysis techniques, and have used in our ongoing research on behavioral, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological studies of minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Our goal is to provide the field with useful guidelines that will promote the inclusion of the entire spectrum of individuals with autism spectrum disorder in future research investigations.

Expressive Language Style among Adolescents and Adults with Williams Syndrome.

Language samples elicited through a picture description task were recorded from 38 adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and one control group matched on age, and another matched on age, IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. The samples were coded for use of various types of inferences, dramatic devices, and verbal fillers; acoustic analyses of prosodic features were carried out, and an independent group of judges provided global ratings of the overall expressiveness of the language. In addition, a standardized measure of social adaptive functioning was administered to the parents of the participants with WS. The findings revealed distinctive developmental trends in the use of expressive content and prosodic patterns by adolescents and adults with WS that were not evident among the controls. Ratings of expressiveness by naive judges of the speech samples produced by the participants with WS were related to parent evaluations of adaptive social communication skills; however, the verbal productions of this group were not judged to be significantly more expressive than those of controls.

Innovative approaches to the study of social phenotypes in neurodevelopmental disorders: an introduction to the research topic.

The field of social-affective neuroscience is growing exponentially, fueled by the availability and widespread use of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques, by advances in molecular genetics and by increasing sophistication in the behavioral characterization of social-affective functioning in both typical and atypical human development. In this context there has been a surge of interest in studying neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) as possible windows into the neurogenetic basis of the “social mind”. While holding great promise for advancing our understanding of genotype-phenotype relationships, research on neurogenetic disorders has encountered considerable challenges, ranging from the rarity of many NDDs with known genetic etiology and the considerable heterogeneity in phenotypic expressions within syndromes, to the difficulty of designing studies able to take in account the critical role played by developmental and epigenetic processes in shaping phenotypic outcomes. The articles collected in this e-book illustrate several ways in which researchers who study people with NDDs have attempted to overcome these limitations.

A Well-Reasoned Approach to Understanding Reasons

It is hard to find a topic that has occasioned more contentious theoretical debates but also more fruitful dialogue between philosophical argumentation and empirical research than that of the nature and origins of our everyday capacity to understand human behavior by ascribing mental states, or what has been labeled our folk psychology. In commenting on the surprising surge of interest over the last few decades in ‘the folklore of the mind,’ the philosopher Radu Bogdan [1991] once cited the essayist Emil Cioran as saying ‘that the two most interesting things in life are gossip and metaphysics’ (p. 1). In some respects Daniel Hutto’s new book Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons is an outstanding illustration of the relevance of this saying for a strand of current theorizing in psychology, philosophy of mind, evolutionary theory and other disciplines, which attempts to reconnect theory of mind (ToM) to social life and its pervasive practice of storytelling about people. This theoretical move toward grounding mental life in sociocultural activities can be traced back to the efforts to bring meaning into the study of human psychology pioneered by Jerome Bruner [1990] and Katherine Nelson [1985, 2007], in response to the prevalent objectivist approaches to cognition that posit innate modules, theoretical explanatory frameworks, or other internal cognitive mechanisms, which have proliferated in contemporary cognitive science. Expanding on Bruner’s influential ideas regarding the roles of narratives in culture and in the development of psychological understanding, Hutto builds a strong argument for why, instead of searching for innate specialized mechanisms, or starter theories, or uniquely human introspective/projective capacities, all inherited from our evolutionary history, we need only to turn to the pieces of gossip and fairy tales and stories about people who act for reasons, which are part of the fabric of social life and abound in most cultures, to discover the roots of our folk psychology. But before evaluating this refreshing proposal, some terminological clarifications need to be put in place.