Effects of lexical properties on viewing time per word in autistic and neurotypical readers

Eye tracking studies from the past few decades have shaped the way we think of word complexity and cognitive load: words that are long, rare and ambiguous are more difficult to read. However, online processing techniques have been scarcely applied to investigating the reading difficulties of people with autism and what vocabulary is challenging for them. We present parallel gaze data obtained from adult readers with autism and a control group of neurotypical readers and show that the former required higher cognitive effort to comprehend the texts as evidenced by three gaze-based measures. We divide all words into four classes based on their viewing times for both groups and investigate the relationship between longer viewing times and word length, word frequency, and four cognitively-based measures (word concreteness, familiarity, age of acquisition and imagability).University of Wolverhampton and German Research Foundation (DFG

Differences in Own-Face but not Own-Name Discrimination between Autistic and Neurotypical Adults:A Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation-EEG Study

Self-related processing is thought to be altered in autism, with several studies reporting that autistic individuals show a diminished neural response relative to neurotypicals for their own name and face. However, evidence remains scarce and is mostly based on event-related potential studies. Here, we used EEG to measure the neural activity of autistic adults (20 for faces, 27 for names) and neurotypical adults (24 for faces, 25 for names) while they were watching rapidly alternating faces and names, through a relatively new technique called Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation. We presented strangers’ faces or names at a base frequency of 5.77 Hz, while one’s own, a close other’s, and a specific stranger’s face/name was presented at an oddball frequency of 1.154 Hz. The neurotypical group showed a significantly greater response to their own face than both close other and stranger faces, and a greater response for close other than for stranger faces. In contrast, in the autism group, own and close other faces showed stronger responses than the stranger’s face, but the difference between own and close other faces was not significant in a bilateral parieto-occipital cluster. No group differences in the enhanced response to familiar names were found. These results replicate and extend results obtained using traditional electroencephalographic techniques which suggest atypical responses to self-relevant stimuli in autism

Autism and the web: using web-searching tasks to detect autism and improve web accessibility

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by ACM in ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing on 02/08/2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1145/3264631.3264633 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.People with autism consistently exhibit different attention-shifting patterns compared to neurotypical people. Research has shown that these differences can be successfully captured using eye tracking. In this paper, we summarise our recent research on using gaze data from web-related tasks to address two problems: improving web accessibility for people with autism and detecting autism automatically. We first examine the way a group of participants with autism and a control group process the visual information from web pages and provide empirical evidence of different visual searching strategies. We then use these differences in visual attention, to train a machine learning classifier which can successfully use the gaze data to distinguish between the two groups with an accuracy of 0.75. At the end of this paper we review the way forward to improving web accessibility and automatic autism detection, as well as the practical implications and alternatives for using eye tracking in these research areas.Published versio

Assessing text and web accessibility for people with autism spectrum disorder

A thesis submitted in partial ful lment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyPeople with Autism Spectrum Disorder experience di culties with reading comprehension and information processing, which a ect their school performance, employability and social inclusion. The main goal of this work is to investigate new ways to evaluate and improve text and web accessibility for adults with autism. The rst stage of this research involved using eye-tracking technology and comprehension testing to collect data from a group of participants with autism and a control group of participants without autism. This series of studies resulted in the development of the ASD corpus, which is the rst multimodal corpus of text and gaze data obtained from participants with and without autism. We modelled text complexity and sentence complexity using sets of features matched to the reading di culties people with autism experience. For document-level classi cation we trained a readability classi er on a generic corpus with known readability levels (easy, medium and di cult) and then used the ASD corpus to evaluate with unseen user-assessed data. For sentencelevel classi cation, we used for the rst time gaze data and comprehension testing to de ne a gold standard of easy and di cult sentences, which we then used as training and evaluation sets for sentence-level classi cation. The ii results showed that both classi ers outperformed other measures of complexity and were more accurate predictors of the comprehension of people with autism. We conducted a series of experiments evaluating easy-to-read documents for people with cognitive disabilities. Easy-to-read documents are written in an accessible way, following speci c writing guidelines and containing both text and images. We focused mainly on the image component of these documents, a topic which has been signi cantly under-studied compared to the text component; we were also motivated by the fact that people with autism are very strong visual thinkers and that therefore image insertion could be a way to use their strengths in visual thinking to compensate for their di culties in reading. We investigated the e ects images in text have on attention, comprehension, memorisation and user preferences in people with autism (all of these phenomena were investigated both objectively and subjectively). The results of these experiments were synthesised in a set of guidelines for improving text accessibility for people with autism. Finally, we evaluated the accessibility of web pages with di erent levels of visual complexity. We provide evidence of existing barriers to nding relevant information on web pages that people with autism face and we explore their subjective experiences with searching the web through survey questions

Social Context Effects on the N400: Evidence for Implicit Theory of Mind?

A prevailing theory within research into Theory of Mind – the ability to attribute mental states to others – is the existence of a two-system model: an automatic fast-paced “implicit” system, followed by a reason-based “explicit” system. Behavioural evidence supports a double dissociation: children fail social tasks with higher cognitive load but pass implicit measures, and Autistic individuals pass reason-based social tasks with practice but fail implicit measures. This thesis probes the neural basis for implicit Theory of Mind, asking: to what extent do individuals automatically process the comprehension of task partners during a Joint Comprehension task? EEG evidence here indicates participants display an N400 – a neural marker indicating lack of comprehension – when a partner deprived of context cannot understand a sentence displayed, even when the participant has the full context for comprehension. This “Social N400” appears to indicate that participants model partner comprehension, their mental state, in real time. The effect is shown in adults and adolescents; does not appear to be explained by sub-mentalising effects; and notably is absent when the task lacks a prompt to consider the confederate’s comprehension. The results suggest implicit mentalising is not automatic, but a cognitive tool employed when online modelling would aid task demands. The Joint Comprehension task outlined provides a tool to further examine the neural basis of implicit social cognition, particularly within Autism Spectrum Disorder where an impairment in implicit mentalising is suggested

The metaphorical brain [Research topic]

This Frontiers Special Issue will synthesize current findings on the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor, provide a forum for voicing novel perspectives, and promote new insights into the metaphorical brain

Epistemic Mentalizing and Causal Cognition Across Agents and Objects

This dissertation examines mentalizing abilities, causal reasoning, and the interactions thereof. Minds are so much more than false beliefs, yet much of the existing research on mentalizing has placed a disproportionately large emphasis on this one aspect of mental life. The first aim of this dissertation is to examine whether representing others’ knowledge states relies on more fundamentally basic cognitive processes than representations of their mere beliefs. Using a mixture of behavioral and brain measures across five experiments, I find evidence that we can represent others\u27 knowledge quicker and using fewer neural resources than when representing others’ beliefs. To be considered a representation of knowledge rather than belief, both mentalizer and mentalizee must accept the propositional content being represented as factive (Kiparsky & Kiparsky, 2014; Williamson, 2002). As such, my results suggest that representing the mental states of others may be cognitively easier when the content of which does not need to be decoupled from one’s own existing view of reality. Our perception of other minds can influence how we attribute causality for certain events. The second aim of this dissertation is to explore how perceptions of agency and prescriptive social norms influence our intuitions of how agents and objects cause events in the world. Using physics simulations and 3D anthropomorphic stimuli, the results of three experiments show that agency, itself, does not make agents more causal to an outcome than objects. Instead, causal judgments about agents and objects differ as a function of the counterfactuals they respectively afford. Furthermore, I show that what distinguishes the counterfactuals we use to make causal attributions to agents and objects are the prescriptions we hold for how they should behave. Why do we say a fire occurred because of a lightning strike, rather than the necessary presence of oxygen? The answer involves our normative expectations of the probability of lightning strikes and the relative ubiquity of oxygen (Icard et al., 2017). The third aim of this dissertation explores the gradation of causal judgments across multiple contributing events that each vary in their statistical probability. I contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about how humans select causes in experimental philosophy and cognitive science by introducing a publicly available dataset containing 47,970 causal attribution ratings collected from 1,599 adult participants and structured around four novel configurations of causal relationships. By quantitatively manipulating the influence of normality, I systematically explore the continuous space of a causal event’s probability from unlikely to certain. It is my hope that this benchmark dataset may serve as a growing testbed for diverging theoretical models proposing to characterize how humans answer the question: Why

Advances in Autism Research

This book represents one of the most up-to-date collections of articles on clinical practice and research in the field of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The scholars who contributed to this book are experts in their field, carrying out cutting edge research in prestigious institutes worldwide (e.g., Harvard Medical School, University of California, MIND Institute, King’s College, Karolinska Institute, and many others). The book addressed many topics, including (1) The COVID-19 pandemic; (2) Epidemiology and prevalence; (3) Screening and early behavioral markers; (4) Diagnostic and phenotypic profile; (5) Treatment and intervention; (6) Etiopathogenesis (biomarkers, biology, and genetic, epigenetic, and risk factors); (7) Comorbidity; (8) Adulthood; and (9) Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP). This book testifies to the complexity of performing research in the field of ASD. The published contributions underline areas of progress and ongoing challenges in which more certain data is expected in the coming years. It would be desirable that experts, clinicians, researchers, and trainees could have the opportunity to read this updated text describing the challenging heterogeneity of Autism Spectrum Disorder