Katja Dindar

University of Eastern Finland | UEF · School of Educational Sciences and Psychology

Recent studies on gaze behaviours in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have utilised “live eye tracking.” Such research has focused on generating quantitative eye tracking measurements, which provide limited (if any) qualitative contextual details of the actual interactions in which gaze occurs. This article presents a novel methodolo...

Research on people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (henceforth autism) is often based upon biomedical understanding. Such understanding tends to view the characteristics related to autism diagnosis, such as the lack of or atypical use of speech, as a sign of incompetence that can be reduced as an underlying pathology of an individual. Howev...

This study examined social-pragmatic inferencing, visual social attention and physiological reactivity to complex social scenes. Participants were autistic young adults (n = 14) and a control group of young adults (n = 14) without intellectual disability. Results indicate between-group differences in social-pragmatic inferencing, moment-level socia...

Since prior research has mostly focused on children, less is known about how autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits interpret pragmatically complex social situations and the kind of narrative discourse they produce. 32 autistic young adults, 18 young adults with sub-clinical autistic traits and 34 non-autistic young adults par...

Tässä tapaustutkimuksessa tarkastellaan vuorovaikutustilanteita, joissa yksi autismikirjon oppilas ja kaksi luokkatoveria suunnittelevat ja kirjoittavat yhdessä fiktiivisen tarinan. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on luoda kuvailevan analyysin avulla kokonaiskuvaa yhteisen tarinan muodostumisen prosessista ja kunkin oppilaan osallistumisen määrästä ja mu...

Difficulties in false belief reasoning are associated with autism spectrum. False belief tasks tend to be easy to administer and code, and thus are often used for testing purposes. However, the amount of information that can be gleaned from this type of assessment task goes beyond correct/wrong score attribution. Instead, fine-grained information m...

This paper presents quantitative and qualitative findings from an interdisciplinary research project exploring student teachers' positive perceptions of people on the autism spectrum. The set of findings reported in this paper asked 704 student teachers from one university in England (n = 191), Finland (n = 251) and Sweden (n = 262) to write down t...

Background: Previous research regarding unresponsiveness in peer interaction, including participants on the autism spectrum (AS), is mainly based on predefined categorizations of unresponsiveness; thus, there is a need for conversation analytic research to examine unresponsiveness from participants’ perspectives. Method: Multimodal conversation ana...

Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of children’s daily living, enabling interaction with adults and peers. A rich literature suggests that communicative abilities develop with age, while little is known about cross-cultural differences and similarities. This study presents a comparison of the communicative performance of Finnish (n = 1...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of speech disfluencies in autistic young adults and controls by using a wide-range disfluency classification of typical disfluencies (TD; i.e., filled pauses, revisions, abandoned utterances, and multisyllable word and phrase repetitions), stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD; i.e., sound a...

Background: Despite increasing knowledge of social communication skills of autistic peole, the interrelatedness of different skills such as non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills is not much known about. A better understanding of the complex interplay between different domains of social communication helps us to deve...

Vuorovaikutuskumppanit eivät aina vastaa autismikirjon lasten aloitteisiin. Tässä tutkimuksessa selvitettiin, millaisia päällekkäistyviä vuorovaikutuksellisia projekteja koulunkäynninohjaajalla ja autismikirjon oppilaalla oli silloin, kun ohjaaja ei vastannut oppilaan sosiaaliseen aloitteeseen. Aineistona oli laadullisen sisällönanalyysin keinoin a...

Tarkastelemme referointikeinoja, joita aikuiset autismikirjon henkilöt ja verrokit käyttävät puhuessaan toisen henkilön ajatuksista. Aineisto on kerätty tutkimustilanteessa, jossa tutkittavia pyydetään kertomaan, mitä videolla nähty henkilö voisi ajatella. Tässä tutkimuksessa referointikeinot on luokiteltu kuvaileviksi ja esittäviksi sen mukaan, py...

Aiemmissa tutkimuksissa on saatu ristiriitaisia tuloksia autismikirjon naisten ja miesten tavasta orientoitua sosiaalisiin tilanteisiin, tulkita niitä ja kertoa niistä. Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastelimme, kuinka autismikirjon naiset (n = 7) ja miehet (n = 24) ja verrokkiryhmän naiset (n = 11) ja miehet (n = 24) kuvaavat sosiopragmaattisesti monimutk...

This chapter presents a brief overview of the current situation and development trend of interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Finland. Interventions, particularly early interventions, are seen crucial for children with ASD in order to support their developing skills. Research has identified multiple interventions that a...

Psykologia, 54(1), 46-50.

Technology-enhanced environments are increasingly used to enhance the interaction skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet little is known about how technology use influences interactions between educators and children. This article examined how educators engage with children with ASD in a technology-enhanced learning environment...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) reportedly have difficulties in responding to bids for joint attention, notably in following pointing gestures. Previous studies have predominantly built on structured observation measures and predefined coding categories to measure children’s responsiveness to gestures. However, how these gestures are d...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are vulnerable to interactional trouble: difficulties in speaking, hearing and understanding. Prior conversation analytic (CA) work has examined how interactional trouble gets repaired mostly in verbal interactions among neurotypical speakers. Non-CA examinations have mainly been concerned with how child...

Background. The Sally-Anne test has been extensively used to examine children’s theory of mind understanding. Many task-related factors have been suggested to impact children’s performance on this test. Yet little is known about the interactional aspects of such dyadic assessment situations that might contribute to the ways in which children respon...

This case is a part of the first author’s current PhD research on interactions involving children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Children with ASD are proposed to have difficulties in coordinating and sharing attention with a partner to an external (“third”) object or a feature in the environment – also referred to as joint attention or triad...

Background Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterised as having challenges in the social use of eye-gaze (e.g., Chawarska, Macari, & Shic, 2013). The research on eye-gaze behaviours is often conducted in carefully controlled settings; less is known about the use of eye-gaze during naturally occurring interactions (but see Nori...

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been reported to exhibit difficulties in tests measuring mental state understanding, such as the Sally-Anne task. There are also vast performance differences among these children, usually explained by individual or task-related factors. Little is known about the interactional factors of face-to-fac...

The purpose of this poster presentation is to discuss how different research methods can be used to identify initiatives by children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) during interaction with teaching staff. The ideas presented originate from two ongoing PhD projects in two countries using different methods. The Finnish case comes from an analysi...

Children with ASD have challenged educational professionals in Finland and abroad in the creation of suitable learning environments, especially for the group of lower functioning and minimally verbal children with ASD. To explore what constitutes a good learning environment and to support learning of children with ASD, we have created a technology-...

Triadisen vuorovaikutuksen tutkimus on osoittanut, että autismin kirjon lapsilla on vaikeuksia tarkkaavaisuuden suuntaamisessa kuten esimerkiksi osoittamiseleiden seuraamisessa. Tyypillisesti tällainen havainnoiva tutkimus käyttää menetelmänään teoriaan pohjautuvia koodauskategorioita. Koodauskategoriat ovat hyödyllisiä triadisten taitojen määrälli...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have challenges in triadic interaction, or joint attention. These skills affect multiple areas of the lives of these children, including their learning and education. Previously, technological solutions have been found to be beneficial for this population. Thus, we were interested in investigating triadi...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often linked with difficulties in triadic interaction or joint attention. This paper investigated the communicative competencies that children with ASD might have in these skills. We report findings from a pilot case study that focused on a school-aged child with ASD who interacted with his adult co-participants in...

This study examined special education teachers’ and assistants’ views on the process and outcomes of an action research project. The context of the study was the CASCATE (Children with Autism Spectrum disorders as Creative Actors in a strength-based Technology-enhanced learning Environment) research project, which investigates the actions of childr...

The aim of this study was to examine an autistic child’s attention, mainly sustained attention, while he was working at different kinds of work stations. This study also aimed at exploring this particular child’s joint actions towards his parent and a tutor he was collaborating with. The main idea was to emphasize the child’s capabilities instead o...