This study examined facial expressions produced during a British Sign Language (BSL) narrative task (Herman et al., International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 49(3):343-353, 2014) by typically developing deaf children and deaf children with autism spectrum disorder. The children produced BSL versions of a video story in which…

Inclusive education requires teachers to adapt to children's learning styles. Children with autism spectrum disorder bring challenges to classroom teaching, often exhibiting interests restricted to particular topics. Teachers can be faced with a dilemma either to accommodate these restricted interests (RIs) into teaching or to keep them out of the…

A behavioral skills training package was used to teach vocal and non-vocal conversation skills to young adults with autism spectrum disorders. A task analysis was created and verified that included both vocal conversation skills such as making comments related to the conversation topic, and non-vocal conversation skills such as maintaining…

Bowler et al. ("Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders" 44(9):2355-2362. doi:10.1007/s10803-014-2105-y, 2014) have suggested that a specific memory impairment in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) arises from hippocampal failure to consolidate multiple related pieces of information. Twenty-four adults diagnosed with ASD and matched…

Autism is currently one of the most prominent and widely discussed human conditions. Its increased prevalence has intensified the demand for effective educational and therapeutic services, and intervention science is providing mounting evidence about practices that positively impact outcomes. The purpose of this report is to describe a set of…

In this review, the history of the theory of mind (ToM) theory of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is outlined (in which ToM is indexed by success on false belief tasks), and the explanatory power and psychological causes of impaired ToM in ASD are critically discussed. It is concluded that impaired ToM by itself has only limited explanatory…

There are many different approaches to intervention aimed at facilitating the social and communicative abilities of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Behavioural interventions seek to improve the social and communicative abilities of children with ASD through interaction. Recently there has been a move towards naturalistic…

Local information processing in 42 adults with high functioning autism, 41 adults with Asperger syndrome and 41 neurotypical adults was examined. Contrary to our expectations, the disorder groups did not outperform the neurotypical group in the neuropsychological measures of local information processing. In line with our hypotheses, the…

Fourteen children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and fourteen age-matched typically-developing (TD) controls were tested on an adapted version of the Twenty Questions Task (Mosher and Hornsby in Studies in cognitive growth. Wiley, New York, pp 86-102, "1966") to examine effects of content, executive and verbal IQ factors on category use in…

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) test is a useful assessment and training tool for persons with developmental disabilities. The present study assessed the predictive validity of the ABLA test with 16 children diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder, eight who performed at ABLA Level 4 and eight who performed at ABLA Level 6.…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of using a constant time delay procedure to teach foundational swimming skills to three children with autism. The skills included flutter kick, front-crawl arm strokes, and head turns to the side. A multiple-probe design across behaviors and replicated across participants was used.…

The purposes of this study were (a) to examine skill acquisition in field hockey of seven junior-high school students with PDD, who attended an inclusive class; and (b) to compare the degree of skill acquisition in field hockey of junior-high school students without disabilities who attend an inclusive class and those who attend a regular class.…

Memory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by greater difficulties with recall rather than recognition and with a diminished use of semantic or associative relatedness in the aid of recall. Two experiments are reported that test the effects of item-context relatedness on recall and recognition in adults with high-functioning ASD…

Impaired diachronic thinking--(the propensity and capacity to think about events spreading across time)--was demonstrated in a 2-Phase study in which children with autism were compared with age and ability matched controls. Identical tests of diachronic thinking were administered in both phases of the study, but to different participant groups,…

Movement interference occurs when concurrently observing and executing incompatible actions and is believed to be due to co-activation of conflicting populations of mirror neurons. It has also been suggested that mirror neurons contribute towards the imitation of observed actions. However, the exact neural substrate of imitation may depend on task…