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88
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April 2010 - March 2013
Publications
Publications (88)
Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The DSM criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally fluent school children (age 5–9 years) to investigate how autisti...
Self-owned items are better remembered than other-owned items; this ownership effect reflects privileged processing of self-related information. The size of this ownership effect has been shown to decrease in neurotypical adults as the number of autistic traits increases, and is reduced in autistic adults. However, emerging evidence has questioned...
Background:
Research has shown that many autistic people have alexithymia, a psychological trait characterized by difficulties in identifying and describing emotions. It is also now clear that there is a high rate of autism among transgender people, but we know little about the intersection of autism and gender diversity or about the clinical feat...
Evidence indicates a link between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and gender diversity, yet this intersection remains insufficiently understood. Here, we investigated whether (1) ASD affects gender-related cognition (i.e., mental processes of perceiving and interpreting one’s own gender self-concept), (2) autistic people have increased gender dyspho...
Extensive work has been done on the metacognitive capacities of humans, as well as to investigate metacognitive processes in nonhuman animals. What we propose here, however, is that there are two very different forms that metacognition can take: either model-based (implicating at least a simplified model of the thinker's own mind), or model-free (r...
Metacognition refers to cognitions about our own cognitions. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to examine metacognition among autistic people. The results from these studies have produced a mixed picture, with some concluding that autistic people are just as accurate as typically developing people in judging their own cognitions an...
The suggested overlap between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and gender dysphoria/incongruence (GD/GI) has been much disputed. This review showed a relationship between ASD traits and GD feelings in the general population and a high prevalence of GD/GI in ASD. Our meta-analyses revealed that the pooled estimate of the prevalence of ASD diagnoses in...
Gender nonconformity is substantially elevated in the autistic population, but the reasons for this are currently unclear. In a recent study, Kallitsounaki and Williams (Kallitsounaki and Williams, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2020; authors 1 and 2 of the current paper) found significant relations between autistic traits and both...
We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When t...
The co-occurrence between autism and gender dysphoria has received much attention recently. We found that, among 101 adults from the general population number of autism traits, as measured using the autism-spectrum quotient was associated significantly with recalled and current gender dysphoric traits. Furthermore, performance on an objective measu...
Questions of how we know our own and other minds, and whether metacognition and mindreading rely on the same processes, are longstanding in psychology and philosophy. In Experiment 1, children/adolescents with autism (who tend to show attenuated mindreading) showed significantly lower accuracy on an explicit metacognition task than neurotypical chi...
Social-communication is profoundly impaired among autistic individuals. Difficulties representing others’ mental states have been linked to modulations of gaze and speech, which have also been shown to be impaired in autism. Despite these observed impairments in ‘real-world’ communicative settings, research has mostly focused on lab-based experimen...
Time-based prospective memory (PM) is diminished under various task demands in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it is still unclear what underpins their impairment or how it could be remediated. This study explored whether instructions to prioritise one element of a PM task over another improved performance in adults with A...
Typically developing adults are able to keep track of story characters' emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in aut...
A link between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and gender identity difficulties has been suggested. In this study, we found that, among adults from the general population (N = 101) ASD traits (measured using the Autism-spectrum Quotient) were associated negatively and significantly with the strength of both explicit gender self-concept (measured usi...
Socio-communication is profoundly impaired among autistic individuals. Difficulties representing others' mental states have been linked to modulations of gaze and speech, which have also been shown to be impaired in autism. Despite these observed impairments in 'real-world' communicative settings, research has mostly focused on lab-based experiment...
Typically developing (TD) individuals rapidly integrate information about a speaker and their intended meaning while processing sentences online. We examined whether the same processes are activated in autistic adults and tested their timecourse in 2 preregistered experiments. Experiment 1 employed the visual world paradigm. Participants listened t...
We argue that comparative psychologists have been too quick to jump to metacognitive interpretations of their data. We examine two such cases in some detail. One concerns so-called "uncertainty monitoring" behavior, which we show to be better explained in terms of first-order estimates of risk. The other concerns informational search, which we argu...
Three experiments investigated the extent to which (a) individuals with autism show a self-reference effect (i.e., better memory for self-relevant information), and (b) the size of the self-reference effect is associated with autism traits. Participants studied trait adjectives in relation to their own name (self-referent) or a celebrity's name (ot...
It has been argued that metacognition and mindreading rely on the same cognitive processes (Carruthers in The opacity of mind: an integrative theory of self-knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011). It is widely accepted that mindreading is diminished among individuals diagnosed with autism (Brunsdon and Happé in Autism 18(1):17–30, 2014),...
Background: Studies have found that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are more likely to make errors in appropriately producing referring expressions (‘the dog’ vs. ‘the black dog’) than are controls but comprehend them with equal facility. We tested whether this anomaly arises because comprehension studies have focused on manipulating p...
Typically developing (TD) adults are able to keep track of story characters’ emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. (2017) showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these proc...
Interoception (the ability to sense what’s going on inside one’s body) is considered integral to many higher-order cognitive processes. Some have speculated that impaired interoception may underpin some features of ASD. Yet, in Experiment 1, we found no evidence of a between-group difference in either cardiac or respiratory interoceptive accuracy a...
Typically developing individuals rapidly integrate information about a speaker and their intended meaning while processing sentences online. We examined whether the same processes are activated in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and tested their timecourse in two pre-registered experiments. Experiment 1 employed the visual world paradig...
Typically developing individuals rapidly integrate information about a speaker and their intended meaning while processing sentences online. We examined whether the same processes are activated in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and tested their timecourse in two pre-registered experiments. Experiment 1 employed the visual world paradig...
Understanding fictional events requires one to distinguish reality from fantasy, and thus engages high-level processes including executive functions and imagination, both of which are impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We examined how adults with and without ASD make sense of reality-violating fantasy narratives by testing real-time unders...
We examined performance on implicit (non-verbal) and explicit (verbal) uncertainty-monitoring tasks among neurotypical participants and participants with autism, while also testing mind-reading abilities in both groups. We found that: (i) performance of autistic participants was unimpaired on the implicit uncertainty-monitoring task, while being si...
Counterfactual emotions, such as regret and relief, require an awareness of how things could have been different. We report a preregistered experiment that examines how adults with and without ASD process counterfactual emotions in real‐time, based on research showing that the developmental trajectory of counterfactual thinking may be disrupted in...
Understanding fictional events requires one to distinguish reality from fantasy, and thus engages high-level processes including executive functions and imagination, both of which are impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We examined how adults with and without ASD make sense of reality-violating fantasy narratives by testing real-time unders...
One feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a deficit in verbal reference production, that is, providing an appropriate amount of verbal information for the listener to refer to things, people, and events. However, very few studies have manipulated whether individuals with ASD can take a speaker's perspective to interpret verbal reference. A c...
Counterfactual emotions, such as regret and relief, require an awareness of how things could have been different. We report a pre-registered experiment that examines the real-time understanding of counterfactual emotions in adults with and without ASD, based on research showing that the developmental trajectory of counterfactual thinking may be dis...
Quattrocki and Friston (2014) argued that abnormalities in interoception—the process of representing one’s internal physiological states—could lie at the heart of autism, because of the critical role interoception plays in the ontogeny of social-affective processes. This proposal drew criticism from proponents of the alexithymia hypothesis, who arg...
Detection of deception is of fundamental importance for everyday social life and might require “mindreading” (the ability to represent others’ mental states). People with diminished mindreading, such as those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), might be at risk of manipulation because of lie detection difficulties. In Experiment 1, performance amo...
Background and aims
Pragmatic language is a key difficulty in autism spectrum disorder. One such pragmatic skill is verbal reference, which allows the current entity of shared interest between speakers to be identified and thus enables fluid conversation. The aim of this review was to determine the extent to which studies have found that verbal ref...
Two experiments are presented that explore online counterfactual processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using eye-tracking. Participants’ eye movements were tracked while they read factual and counterfactual sentences in an anomaly detection task. In Experiment 1, the sentences depicted everyday counterfactual situations (e.g., If Joanne had...
Purpose
According to Vygotskian theory, verbal thinking serves to guide our behavior and underpins critical self-regulatory functions. Indeed, numerous studies now link inner speech usage with performance on tests of executive function (EF). However, the selectivity of inner speech contributions to multifactorial executive planning performance and...
Lay summary:
Neurotypical people tend to find it easier to perceive and remember information that relates to themselves than information that relates to others. Research suggests that people with ASD show a diminished (or absent) self-bias in memory and that severity of ASD predicts the extent of this diminution (more severe ASD = smaller self-bia...
This chapter provides an overview of the issue of comorbidity, and its importance for both research and clinical practice, as well as to consider possible strategies for teasing apart explanations for this phenomenon. In developmental psychopathology research, comorbidity is said to occur when one or more disorders co-occur with a primary disorder...
Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to carry out a planned intention at an appropriate moment in the future. Research on PM in ASD has produced mixed results. We aimed to establish the extent to which two types of PM (event-based/time-based) are impaired in ASD. In part 1, a meta-analysis of all existing studies indicates a large imp...
The extent to which cognition is verbally mediated in neurotypical individuals is the subject of debate in cognitive neuropsychology, as well as philosophy and psychology. Studying “verbal thinking” in developmental/neuropsychological disorders provides a valuable opportunity to inform theory building, as well as clinical practice. In this paper, w...
Among neurotypical adults, errors made with high confidence (i.e. errors a person strongly believed they would not make) are corrected more reliably than errors made with low confidence. This ‘hypercorrection effect’ is thought to result from enhanced attention to information that reflects a ‘metacognitive mismatch’ between one’s beliefs and realit...
This study explored whether adults and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate difficulties making metacognitive judgments, specifically judgments of learning. Across two experiments, the study examined whether individuals with ASD could accurately judge whether they had learnt a piece of information (in this case word pairs). I...
It is well established that neurotypical individuals generally show better memory for actions they have performed than actions they have observed others perform or merely read about, a so-called ‘enactment effect’. Strikingly, research has also shown that neurotypical individuals demonstrate superior memory for actions they intend to perform in the...
Metacognition consists of monitoring processes (the ability to accurately represent one’s own mental states) and control processes (the ability to control one’s cognitive processes effectively). Both processes play vital roles in self-regulated learning. However, currently it is unclear whether these processes are impaired in individuals with autis...
Owned objects occupy a privileged cognitive processing status and are viewed almost as extensions of the self. It has been demonstrated that items over which a sense of ownership is felt will be better remembered than other items (an example of the "self-reference effect"). As autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by an a typical self-con...
Metacognition refers to cognition about cognition and encompasses both knowledge of cognitive processes and the ability to monitor and control one's own cognitions. The current study aimed to establish whether metacognition is impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). According to some theories, the ability to represent one's own mental states (a...
Across studies, analysis of performance on classic measures of executive functioning (EF) among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggests that people with this disorder may be impaired only when tasks are experimenter-administered, but not when the same tasks are computer-administered. This would imply that the underlying cause of ap...
This study explored whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with action monitoring. Two experimental tasks examined whether adults with ASD are able to monitor their own actions online, and whether they also show a typical enactment effects in memory (enhanced memory for actions they have performed compared t...
Research suggests that spatial navigation relies on the same neural network as episodic memory, episodic future thinking, and theory of mind (ToM). Such findings have stimulated theories (e.g., the scene construction and self-projection hypotheses) concerning possible common underlying cognitive capacities. Consistent with such theories, autism spe...
Objective:
Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to carry out an intended action. Working memory is the ability to store information in mind while processing potentially distracting information. The few previous studies of PM in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have yielded inconsistent findings. Studies of working memory ability in ASD...
Objective:
There appears to be a common network of brain regions that underlie the ability to recall past personal experiences (episodic memory) and the ability to imagine possible future personal experiences (episodic future thinking). At the cognitive level, these abilities are thought to rely on "scene construction" (the ability to bind togethe...
This chapter explores two main themes in two separate sections. The first section explores some of the challenges involved in the diagnosis of complex developmental disorders such as specific language impairment (SLI), developmental dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second section of...
Prospective memory (remembering to carry out an action in the future) has been studied relatively little in ASD. We explored time-based (carry out an action at a pre-specified time) and event-based (carry out an action upon the occurrence of a pre-specified event) prospective memory, as well as possible cognitive correlates, among 21 intellectually...
A number of recently developed theories (e.g., the constructive episodic simulation, self-projection, and scene construction hypotheses) propose that the ability to simulate possible future events (sometimes referred to as episodic future thinking, prospection, or foresight) depends on the same neurocognitive system that is implicated in the recall...
Language-impaired individuals with autism perform poorly on tests such as non-word repetition that are sensitive clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI). This has fuelled the theory that language impairment in autism represents a co-morbid SLI. However, the underlying cause of these deficits may be different in each disorder. In a no...
Evidence regarding the use of inner speech by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is equivocal. To clarify this issue, the current study employed multiple techniques and tasks used across several previous studies. In Experiment 1, participants with and without ASD showed highly similar patterns and levels of serial recall for visually p...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) comprises a range of developmental disorders including autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder,
and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified/atypical autism, each of which is characterized by a triad of
impairments in social interaction, communication, and restricted, repetitive behaviours and interests...
Background: Individuals with Asperger’s syndrome/high-functioning autism (HFA) have clinically significant difficulties with communication despite (by definition) normal structural language abilities. However, recent studies suggest that sub-clinical abnormalities in structural language that are difficult to detect using standardised language tests...
Assuming that self-awareness is not a unitary phenomenon, and that one can be aware of different aspects of self at any one time, it follows that selective impairments in self-awareness can occur. This article explores the idea that autism involves a particular deficit in awareness of the ‘psychological self’, or ‘theory of own mind’. This hypothes...
Studies of inner speech use in ASD have produced conflicting results. Lidstone et al., J Autism Dev Disord (2009) hypothesised that Cognitive Profile (i.e., discrepancy between non-verbal and verbal abilities) is a predictor of inner speech use amongst children with ASD. They suggested other, contradictory results might be explained in terms of the...
Studies of emotion processing in autism have produced mixed results, with fewer studies observing autism-specific deficits than might be imagined. In the current study, 21 individuals with autism and 21 age- and ability-matched, learning disabled comparison participants were tested for their ability to (a) recognise, in others, expressions of ‘soci...
Background:
“Inner speech” is critical for flexible thinking and behaviour (Zelazo, 2004). Yet, individuals with ASD sometimes report that their thoughts consist predominantly of visual images, rather than speech (Hurlburt, Happ, & Frith, 1996), which may contribute to their limitations in cognitive and behavioural flexibility (Russell, Jarrold,...
Two experiments were conducted to explore the extent to which individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as well as young typically developing (TD) children, are explicitly aware of their own and others' intentions. In Experiment 1, participants with ASD were significantly less likely than age- and ability-matched comparison participants to c...
Background:
Early experimental research suggested that children with autism have severe difficulties in recognising and experiencing all types of emotion (e.g., Hobson et al., 1988). More recently, it has been suggested that high-functioning individuals (with IQs over 70) have difficulties in recognising/experiencing so-called “social emotions” (...
This commentary focuses on evidence from autism concerning the relation between metacognition and mindreading. We support Carruthers' rejection of models 1 (independent systems) and 3 (metacognition before mindreading), and provide evidence to strengthen his critique. However, we also present evidence from autism that we believe supports model 2 (o...
The task used most widely to assess recognition of false belief in self and others is the 'Smarties' unexpected contents task. Amongst individuals with and without autism, the Self and Other-person test questions of this task are of an equivalent level of difficulty. However, a potential confound with this task may allow the Self test question to b...
Two experiments were conducted to explore the extent to which individuals with autism experience difficulties in monitoring their own actions, both online and in memory. Participants with autism performed similarly in terms of levels and, importantly, patterns of performance to IQ-matched comparison participants. Each group found it easier to monit...
It has been suggested that language impairment in autism is behaviorally, neurobiologically, and etiologically related to specific language impairment (SLI). In this article, the authors review evidence at each level and argue that the vast majority of data does not support the view that language impairment in autism can be explained in terms of co...
Background: The self-monitoring-deficit view of ASD (e.g., Russell & Hill, 2001), proposes a primary impairment in pre-conceptual self-awareness of own agency and actions. This leaves affected individuals with little feeling of responsibility for their own actions ‘from the inside’. By contrast, Williams and Happ (at IMFAR 2007) suggested their fin...
Inner speech has been linked to higher-order cognitive processes including 'theory of mind', self-awareness and executive functioning, all of which are impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Individuals with ASD, themselves, report a propensity for visual rather than verbal modes of thinking. This study explored the extent to which children wi...
Impaired diachronic thinking-(the propensity and capacity to think about events spreading across time)-was demonstrated in a 2-Phase study in which children with autism were compared with age and ability matched controls. Identical tests of diachronic thinking were administered in both phases of the study, but to different participant groups, with...
Impaired diachronic thinking—(the propensity and capacity to think about events spreading across time)—was demonstrated in a 2-Phase study in which children with autism were compared with age and ability matched controls. Identical tests of diachronic thinking were administered in both phases of the study, but to different participant groups, with...
