This study assessed attachment security in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders, using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996). Of 20 participants, three were classified as securely attached, the same proportion as would be expected in a general clinical sample. Participants' AAIs were less coherent and lower in reflective function than those of cont...

An ongoing debate in developmental cognitive neuroscience is whether individuals with autism are able to learn prototypical category representations from multiple exemplars. Prototype learning and memory were examined in a group of high-functioning autistic boys and young men, using a classic paradigm in which participants learned to classify novel dot patterns into one of two categories. Parti...

BACKGROUND Understanding and anticipating others' mental or emotional states relies on the processing of social cues, such as dynamic facial expressions. Individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) may process these cues differently from individuals with typical development (TD) and purportedly use a 'mechanistic' rather than a 'mentalistic' approach, involving rule- and contingency-based in...

One of the core defining components of autism is impairment in communication, typically manifested as a delay in speech development. To date, neuroimaging studies have shed limited light on the mechanisms behind delay in speech development in autism. We performed magnetoencephalographic-based auditory language mapping in 2 cases of high-functioning autism. Overall, 2 distinct characteristics we...

objectives: the incidence of stereotyped behaviors is one of the major symptoms of diagnosis of individuals with autism spectrum disorder that causes disruption in daily life. this study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of ball exercises on the reduction of stereotypical behavior of children with autism spectrum disorder. methods: in this study, 16 children (boys) with autism spectrum diso...

Sentence complexity in children with autism and specific language impairment." MA (Master of Arts) thesis, iii ABSTRACT Children with high-functioning autism, children with specific language impairment, children with autism and language impairment, and controls produced sentences after a prompt to form a sentence using a specific word. The sentences were analyzed for length and syntactic comple...

Individuals with high-functioning autism sometimes exhibit intact or superior performance on visuospatial tasks, in contrast to impaired functioning in other domains such as language comprehension, executive tasks, and social functions. The goal of the current study was to investigate the neural bases of preserved visuospatial processing in highfunctioning autism from the perspective of the cor...

The high-functioning Autism Spectrum Screening Questionnaire (ASSQ) is a 27-item checklist for completion by lay informants when assessing symptoms characteristic of Asperger syndrome and other high-functioning autism spectrum disorders in children and adolescents with normal intelligence or mild mental retardation. Data for parent and teacher ratings in a clinical sample are presented along wi...

introduction : we aimed to assess the status of sensory processing in children with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, high-functioning autism and typical peers. methods: participants in this study are children 7 to 10 years old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (n = 30), autistic children with high cognitive function (n = 28) and 30 matched typical children. parents of c...

An increasing number of animal studies advert to a substantial role of the neuropeptide oxytocin in the regulation of social attachment and affiliation. Furthermore, animal studies showed anxiety and stress-reduced effects of oxytocin. First human studies confirm these findings in animal studies and implicate a crucial role of oxytocin in human social attachment behavior and in social interacti...