Mathematical morphology and applications in automated sunspot detection

This presentation discusses the mathematical morphology and applications in automated sunspot detection

Interview: Tony Reekie

In 2015, Tony Reekie stood down as Director of Imaginate, Scotland’s national art-form development organisation for theatre for young audiences. Tony had programmed the annual Imaginate Festival of performing arts for children and young people since 2000, bringing companies from around the world to Edinburgh each May to share their work. Prior to joining Imaginate in 1996, Tony worked with a host of well-known Scottish theatre companies, including 7:84, TAG and Visible Fictions. In this interview, he reflects on the changes he’s observed within children’s theatre over the past two decades. He discusses taboos, funding, art for babies, nationhood and theatre as a political act, presenting Scotland as a site of distinctive practices and aesthetic modalities.Publisher PD

Understanding attention to social information in adults with and without autism spectrum disorders

This thesis aims to further our understanding of social attention, and its manifestation in adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and their typically-developed (TD) peers. Atypicalities in social attention have been proposed to play a crucial role in the development of autism. If social attention difficulties persist across the life-span, we would also expect them to impair ongoing social interactions in adolescents and adults with ASD. However, social attention in adulthood has been little examined. Instead, research tends to focus on more complex social cognitive difficulties, or to investigate attention to social stimuli presented in isolation. Our understanding of the role of social attention in autism is further inhibited by conflicting evidence on the influence of high-level input and low-level stimulus properties on selecting the focus of attention in TD individuals. The studies presented here tackle these issues by assessing social attention in adults using stimuli which: present social information in a realistic context; measure spontaneous attentional processes; and provide control over the low-level properties of stimuli. Three studies each employed a method newly applied to the study of social attention. These were: a free-description task that coded verbal accounts of social scenes; a social change detection task that recorded change detection speed and accuracy for alterations to social and non-social aspects of a person; and a preferential-looking task that presented social and non-social scenes side-by-side, while recording eye-movements. It was predicted that findings from each study would indicate a social attention bias in TD adults, while people with ASD would have either a weaker social attention bias or no bias at all. In contrast to predictions, these results showed that people with ASD spontaneously attend to social stimuli, as revealed by the social content of their verbal descriptions and their rapid and accurate detection of changes to eye-gaze direction. However, eye-tracking data in the preferential-looking task indicate that the social attention bias is subtly different in people with ASD, who show a reduced attentional priority for social information, and less persistence in looking at social stimuli over time, compared to TD participants. A series of cross-task analyses examining relationships between tasks indicated that a single social attention construct whichoperates across tasks and scenarios may not exist. These studies also emphasise the need to make distinctions between different types of social information and the idea of a hierarchy of social stimuli available in the real world is proposed. Taken together, the studies reported in this thesis provide new data indicating that social attentional difficulties found in children with autism do not continue in adulthood. Strong attentional preferences for social information, which override the influence of low-level stimulus properties, are found in both TD and ASD groups. The findings also contribute a new way of thinking about the construct of social attention, in particular indicating that different types of social information may interact with individual attentional preferences. These data are interpreted in the context of recent fmdings of perceptual atypicalities in people with ASD, which may interact with their social difficulties. The motion and multi-sensory properties of real-life social interaction may present specific processing difficulties for people with ASD. If so, the mild group differences found in our studies could translate into profound problems for people with ASD in the real world, and this is an area ripe for future research

Transdiagnostic research and the neurodiversity paradigm: commentary on the transdiagnostic revolution in neurodevelopmental disorders by Astle et al.

In their comprehensive and articulate paper on the Transdiagnostic Revolution in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Astle, Holmes, Kievit and Gathercole (2022) ‘consider how well current classifications of neurodevelopmental disorders serve our understanding’. They examine the lack of mapping between clinical diagnoses such as ADHD or autism and research data at other levels of explanation, including genetics, neural structure and function, and cognition. The authors come to the conclusion that, if our goal is to explain variability and complexity, understand mechanisms and guide support decisions, ‘diagnostic taxonomies that classify individuals in terms of discrete categories are ill‐suited’. In this commentary, I explore alignment between their account of the transdiagnostic revolution and the neurodiversity paradigm and identify how transdiagnostic methods may promote neurodiversity‐affirmative research and practice