Sensitizing a Gifted Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder towards Social Cognition: From Assessment to Treatment

Social cognition difficulties are well documented in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This clinical case study reports on social cognition assessment and treatment of a gifted child, SC (9 years), with ASD and an extraordinarily high verbal IQ (146). The assessment of theory of mind, emotion recognition and pragmatic abilities showed some weaknesses in these areas. The 4- month treatment was divided into 14 sessions and was aimed at helping SC to improve his abilities to recognize emotions and comprehend mental states. The main technique used in the intervention was “social reading” with video clips. The initial assessment was repeated after the treatment and in a follow up session. The results of this case study suggest that “social reading” can be considered as a beneficial technique for children with high-functioning ASD, and especially in giftedness conditions

Design activities: how to analyze cognitive effort associated to cognitive treatments?

Working memory issues are important in many real activities. Thus, measuring cognitive effort (or mental load) has been a main research topic for years in cognitive ergonomics, though no consensual method to study such aspect has been proposed. In addition, we argue that cognitive effort has to be related to an analysis of the evolution of cognitive processes, which has been called "time processing". Towards this end, we present and discuss paradigms that have been used for years to study writing activities and, in experiments reported in this paper, for studying design activities, such as computer-graphic tasks or web site desig

Recognising the ageing face: the role of age in face processing

The effects of age-induced changes on face recognition were investigated as a means of exploring the role of age in the encoding of new facial memories. The ability of participants to recognise each of six previously learnt faces was tested with versions which were either identical to the learnt faces, the same age (but different in pose and expression), or younger or older in age. Participants were able to cope well with facial changes induced by ageing: their performance with older, but not younger, versions was comparable to that with faces which differed only in pose and expression. Since the large majority of different age versions were recognised successfully, it can be concluded that the process of recognition does not require an exact match in age characteristics between the stored representation of a face and the face currently in view. As the age-related changes explored here were those that occur during the period of growth, this in turn implies that the underlying structural physical properties of the face are (in addition to pose and facial expression) invariant to a certain extent

A pilot study of the relations within which hearing voices participates : towards a functional distinction between voice hearers and controls

The current research used the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) as a preliminary step toward bringing a broad, functional approach to understanding psychosis, by focusing on the specific phenomenon of auditory hallucinations of voices and sounds (often referred to as hearing voices). On this path, we created a taxonomy of some critical features of voice hearing based on the existing literature (i.e., perceived normality of voices, appraisals of self and other people hearing voices, and fear of voices) as a focus of our experimental manipulations. It was our hope that our findings would add to the broad literature that has used explicit measures to study these phenomena, and that the use of an 'implicit' measure might assist toward a functional analytic understanding. Three pilot studies were conducted to assess the relations within which hearing voices participates in non-clinical voice hearers (i.e., individuals who hear voices but have no clinical diagnosis or distress) and compared to non-voice hearing control participants. The IRAP effects demonstrated both positive and negative relational responses across the three studies, and these effects varied according to explicit levels of delusional ideation. Furthermore, these IRAP effects also predicted explicit aspects of voice hearing and well-being. The current set of pilot studies demonstrate the utility and precision of the IRAP in this domain, and we propose that this type of experimental analysis may hold potential for future bottom-up functional analyses of voice hearing

Platonic model of mind as an approximation to neurodynamics

Hierarchy of approximations involved in simplification of microscopic theories, from sub-cellural to the whole brain level, is presented. A new approximation to neural dynamics is described, leading to a Platonic-like model of mind based on psychological spaces. Objects and events in these spaces correspond to quasi-stable states of brain dynamics and may be interpreted from psychological point of view. Platonic model bridges the gap between neurosciences and psychological sciences. Static and dynamic versions of this model are outlined and Feature Space Mapping, a neurofuzzy realization of the static version of Platonic model, described. Categorization experiments with human subjects are analyzed from the neurodynamical and Platonic model points of view

A flexible view of spontaneous trait inferences

For a long time, social psychologists focused on understanding how perceivers interpret other people’s behavior. One central question has been the identification of the conditions under which perceivers infer personality traits of others. Recent studies (e.g., Winter & Uleman, 1984) suggested that the inference of a trait about an actor from his behavior is a spontaneous process, with characteristics of automaticity. In the present thesis, evidence is presented in favor of a more flexible view of the spontaneous trait inference (STI) process. First, we tested whether STIs are weaker when traits are not so easily inferable from behaviors (Experiment 1). Second, in two sets of experiments we examined whether STIs are guided by coherence requirements. In the first set, we explored whether both STI and spontaneous situational inferences are influenced by the social category of the actor (Experiments 2, 3, and 4). In the second set, we analyzed whether STIs are influenced by the previous presentation of behavioral information about the same actor (Experiments 5 and 6). Finally, the nature of the STI process was further explored by examining whether previous STIs are deliberatively used is subsequent tasks (Experiment 7) and by analyzing how previous STIs influence the processing of congruent and incongruent information (Experiment 8). Results, in general, support a flexible view of the STI process. The implications of our work for the debate about the automaticity of the STI process, and for the analysis of the cognitive mechanisms underlying STIs are discussed.Desde há muito que os psicólogos sociais se preocupam em compreender os processos envolvidos na interpretação comportamental. Uma questão central é tentar identificar as condições em que os percipientes inferem traços de personalidade acerca dos outros actores socias. Estudos recentes (e.g., Winter & Uleman, 1984) sugerem que inferir um traço acerca de um actor, a partir do seu comportamento, é um processo espontâneo, com características de automaticidade. Na presente proposta, são apresentados resultados que favorecem uma visão mais flexível do processo de inferências espontâneas de traço (IET). Primeiro, testou-se em que medida as IET são menos prováveis quando os comportamentos não são tão implicativos de traço (Experiência 1). Segundo, em dois conjuntos de experiências, examinou-se em que medida as IET são modeladas por requisitos de coerência. No primeiro conjunto, explorou-se a influência da categoria social do alvo na ocorrência de IET e de inferências espontâneas situacionais (Experiências 2, 3, e 4). No segundo conjunto, analizou-se o efeito da apresentação de informação comportamental prévia acerca do actor na magnitude das IET (Experiências 5 e 6). Por último, explorou-se a natureza das IET. Na Experiência 7, verificou-se em que medida IET prévias são usadas deliberadamente em tarefas subsequentes. Na Experiência 8 analisou-se a influência das IET no processamento subsequente de informação consistente ou inconsistente. Os resultados, em geral, favorecem uma visão flexível das IET. Serão debtidas as implicações dos resultados para o debate acerca da automaticidade das IET, assim como para a análise dos processos subjacentes às IET

Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12-month-olds

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We tested the hypotheses that 1-year-old infants distinctively represent familiar objects as exemplars of their kind, and that ostensive communication plays a role in determining kind membership for ambiguous objects. In the training phase of our experiment, infants were exposed to movies displaying an agent sorting objects from two categories (cups and plates) into two locations (left or right). Afterwards, different groups of infants saw either an ostensive or a non-ostensive demonstration performed by the agent, revealing that a new object that looked like a plate can be transformed into a cup. A third group of infants experienced no demonstration regarding the new object. During test, infants were presented with the ambiguous object in the plate format, and we measured generalization by coding anticipatory looks to the plate or the cup side. While infants looked equally often towards the two sides when the demonstration was non-ostensive, and more often to the plate side when there was no demonstration, they performed more anticipatory eye movements to the cup side when the demonstration was ostensive. Thus, ostensive demonstration likely highlighted the hidden dispositional properties of the target object as kind-relevant, guiding infants’ categorization of the foldable cup as a cup, despite it looking like a plate. These results suggest that infants likely encode familiar objects as exemplars of their kind and that ostensive communication can play a crucial role in disambiguating what kind an object belongs to, even when this requires disregarding salient surface features

Lexical acquisition in elementary science classes

The purpose of this study was to further researchers' understanding of lexical acquisition in the beginning primary schoolchild by investigating word learning in small-group elementary science classes. Two experiments were conducted to examine the role of semantic scaffolding (e.g., use of synonymous terms) and physical scaffolding (e.g., pointing to referents) in children's acquisition of novel property terms. Children's lexical knowledge was assessed using multiple tasks (naming, comprehension, and definitional). Children struggled to acquire meanings of adjectives without semantic or physical scaffolding (Experiment 1), but they were successful in acquiring extensive lexical knowledge when offered semantic scaffolding (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 also shows that semantic scaffolding used in combination with physical scaffolding helped children acquire novel adjectives and that children who correctly named pictures of adjectives had acquired definitions