Deborah Fein

Affect comprehension in children with pervasive developmental disorders.

Affect comprehension was studied in children with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) and normal children matched for mental age. Three matching tasks were used: matching objects (a nonsocial control task), matching faces, and matching affects. The three tasks were developed to be of equal difficulty for normal children. Children were also tested for comprehension and expression of affect terms. The PDD children were impaired on affect matching relative to the normal controls. The PDD children were impaired on face and affect matching relative to their own performance on object matching, whereas the normal children were not. Within the PDD sample, object matching was correlated with mental age measures but not with measures of social behavior and play, but face and affect matching were significantly correlated with mental age as well as social behavior and play. Individual PDD children who showed relative deficits on face or affect matching tended to be more socially impaired than PDD children whose face and affect matching was consonant with their mental age. Results are discussed in terms of possible etiologies of the social deficit in PDD children, and the importance of subtypes within this population.

Sustained attention in children with autism

Although many children with early infantile autism cannot maintain attention to externally imposed tasks, they may continue a repetitive behavior of their own choosing for long periods of time. This study examined the performance of autistic and mental age matched normal children on a Continuous Performance Test of sustained attention. Results suggest that autistic childrens difficulties in sustaining attention on imposed tasks may be attributable partly to a developmental delay and partly to the motivational contingencies of task rather than to a primary impairment in the ability to sustain attention.

Auditory comprehension and aging: Decline in syntactic processing

Comprehension of six syntactic structures was tested across four age groups. Each structure was presented with both plausible and implausible content. The contribution of cognitive nonlinguistic factors important for comprehension (attention, short-term memory, and mental control) was tested via standard neuropsychological tasks. Sixty-six women aged 30–79 were tested. Both errors and reaction times increased with age, especially for more complex syntactic types and implausible sentences. The neuropsychological factors tested contributed minimally to an age-related decline in comprehension, suggesting that the subtle breakdown seen in syntactic processing may be a language-specific impairment.

Delayed match-to-sample performance in autistic children

The involvement of temporal lobe structures in autism has found support in several animal and human studies. The delayed match‐ and nonmatch‐to‐sample paradigms are two tasks that are sensitive to temporal lobe and frontal lobe development and damage and may be useful in the study of autism. High and low‐functioning autistic disordered (HAD, LAD) subjects and developmental language‐disordered (DLD) and mentally retarded (MR) control subjects were tested on a two stimuli matching paradigm. Both trial‐unique and repeated‐stimuli procedures were used. All subjects performed equally well with both procedures. Performances of HAD subjects and controls of similar nonverbal intelligence (DLD subjects) were not significantly different. The LAD group performed at chance levels and scored significantly lower than all other groups, but covarying for nonverbal intelligence eliminated all significant group differences. These results indicate successful performance on a visual recognition memory task by HAD subjects. T...

Clinical Correlates of Brainstem Dysfunction in Autistic Children.

Children with the diagnosis of autism were tested for brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEP), and information was gathered on their medical and developmental histories and current developmental levels of symptomatology. On comparing the nine autistic children having abnormal BAEPs and the seven autistic children with normal BAEPs, the former were found to have exhibited greater pathology in the areas of attention and social accessibility. No differences were found between the groups on measures of language, motor, or perceptual functioning, or on previous diagnoses or medical history. It is suggested that social and attentional pathology may be more specifically associated with the brainstem pathology that may characterize autism than are symptoms in other developmental areas.

Delay versus deviance in autistic social behavior

The pattern of acquisition of social, communication, and daily living skills was examined for autistic children, compared to retarded and normal controls, by quantifying intradomain scatter on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales. Autistic children were matched to normal children and mentally retarded children on Vineland raw scores; group differences in scatter were examined for each domain of adaptive behavior. Autistic children had significantly more scatter on Communication and Socialization than both control groups. Item analyses showed that the autistic children had particular weaknesses on items reflecting attention to and pragmatic use of language, as well as play and reciprocal social interaction; the autistic children had particular strengths on items reflecting written language and rote language skills, and rule-governed social behavior. The number of items showing consistent group differences, however, was small, suggesting that although autistic development appears sequentially deviant and not merely delayed, individual autistic children derive their scatter from different items, and are a developmentally heterogenous group.

Cognitive subtypes in developmentally disabled children: A pilot study

Differential diagnoses within the pervasive developmental disorders have insufficient reliability, validity, and descriptive homogeneity within groups to be used as distinct categories for research purposes. This study reports the results of cognitive subtyping of 54 developmentally disabled children. Fifty-one were successfully categorized in a small number of groups, characterized by different strengths and weaknesses on verbal, performance, memory, and quantitative tests. About half of the children had the relatively good visuospatial performance expected on the basis of previous literature on autistic children; these children were not behaviorally more autistic than the others. Measures of internal validity are reported, as well as validation by cognitive and behavioral variables. These results tentatively suggest that such psychiatric manifestations as autistic aloofness and maintenance of sameness may be relatively independent of cognitive skill patterns.

Language skills in developmentally disabled children

Abstract Language measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, story telling, and immediate verbal memory, as well as two perceptual tests, were administered to a group of developmentally disabled children, and three groups of normal children, one matched for chronological age, one for mean length of utterance, and one for performance on one of the perceptual tests. When diagnostic subgroups of “autism,” “childhood schizophrenia,” and “other severe disturbance” were formed using standard diagnostic tools, no language differences were found between diagnostic subgroups. When compared with the normal control groups, many of the language skills of the entire group of disabled children, and of the autistic children alone, were rather evenly delayed, showing only a relative sparing of the naming function, and a relative deficit on immediate verbal memory. Furthermore, a high correlation was found in a small subsample between the difficulty levels of morphemes in the disabled children and those reported for young normal children. Experienced special-education and early-childhood teachers could not discriminate the stories of the disabled children from those of young normal children. Analysis of the disabled childrens error strategies, however, revealed features of their language not found in normal childrens language: (1) extreme perseveration in test answers and stories, (2) attention to minor features of test stimuli, and (3) failure to adopt alternate, flexible communicative strategies. We conclude that the language acquisition of the developmentally disabled children is delayed but not deviant in its semantic and syntactic competence, and that current diagnostic practice does not differentiate linguistically distinct subgroups. We further argue that where developmentally disabled children do exhibit aberrant features of language, such deviance parallels similar features in other cognitive skills, and is not unique to language.

Cognitive Functioning in Autism

Autism is a syndrome that is defined primarily in behavioral terms, but is universally associated with cognitive deficits of varying degrees. Theorists over the last 30 years have argued over the primacy of cognitive versus affective and behavioral symptoms. Regardless of how this debate is ultimately resolved, an understanding of cognitive processes in autism is prerequisite to a full understanding of how the syndrome develops, and is necessary for designing effective strategies to ameliorate these cognitive deficits. In normally developing children, cognitive development proceeds in concert with affective development, within the context of social relationships. The study of cognition in autism may contribute understanding not only to children affected with this syndrome, but also to the ways in which cognitive, social, and affective development can be dissociated in abnormal development.

Social or Cognitive or Both? Crucial Dysfunctions in Autism

Although the word “autism” means social withdrawal, and although the syndrome of autism is defined with social withdrawal as a core deficit, the nature of social withdrawal in autism has yet to be clearly understood. What has become clear is that the social impairment is much more complex and more various than can be adequetely summed up by the behavioral label of “social withdrawal” (Wmg, 1981).