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Eyewitness Testimony in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Review
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is estimated to affect around 1% of the population, and is characterised by impairments in social interaction, communication, and behavioural flexibility. A number of risk factors indicate that individuals with ASD may become victims or witnesses of crimes. In addition to their social and communication deficits, people with ASD also have very specific memory problems, which impacts on their abilities to recall eyewitnessed events. We begin this review with an overview of the memory difficulties that are experienced by individuals with ASD, before discussing the studies that have specifically examined eyewitness testimony in this group and the implications for investigative practice. Finally, we outline related areas that would be particularly fruitful for future research to explore
Overexpression of Homer1a in the basal and lateral amygdala impairs fear conditioning and induces an autism-like social impairment
Neural processing of natural sounds
Natural sounds include animal vocalizations, environmental sounds such as wind, water and fire noises and non-vocal sounds made by animals and humans for communication. These natural sounds have characteristic statistical properties that make them perceptually salient and that drive auditory neurons in optimal regimes for information transmission.Recent advances in statistics and computer sciences have allowed neuro-physiologists to extract the stimulus-response function of complex auditory neurons from responses to natural sounds. These studies have shown a hierarchical processing that leads to the neural detection of progressively more complex natural sound features and have demonstrated the importance of the acoustical and behavioral contexts for the neural responses.High-level auditory neurons have shown to be exquisitely selective for conspecific calls. This fine selectivity could play an important role for species recognition, for vocal learning in songbirds and, in the case of the bats, for the processing of the sounds used in echolocation. Research that investigates how communication sounds are categorized into behaviorally meaningful groups (e.g. call types in animals, words in human speech) remains in its infancy.Animals and humans also excel at separating communication sounds from each other and from background noise. Neurons that detect communication calls in noise have been found but the neural computations involved in sound source separation and natural auditory scene analysis remain overall poorly understood. Thus, future auditory research will have to focus not only on how natural sounds are processed by the auditory system but also on the computations that allow for this processing to occur in natural listening situations.The complexity of the computations needed in the natural hearing task might require a high-dimensional representation provided by ensemble of neurons and the use of natural sounds might be the best solution for understanding the ensemble neural code
Sec1p and Mso1p C-terminal tails cooperate with the SNAREs and Sec4p in polarized exocytosis
It is shown that Sec1p C-terminal tail is needed for proper Sec1p-SNARE complex interaction. Furthermore, evidence is provided that the Mso1p C terminus collaborates with the GTP-bound form of Sec4p in the bud. These results reveal a role for the Sec1p C-terminal tail in SNARE complex binding and suggest Mso1p as an effector for Sec4p