Representational Difficulties in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Transcription

1 Representational Difficulties in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders Sharon Weiss-Kapp Med CCC SL/P Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor MGH- Institute of Health Professions Boston MA Senior Clinical Associate Autism Language program Children s Hospital Boston

2 Areas to be addressed Representational ability Joint attention Intentionality Theory of mind Associative learning Generalization of concepts Gestalt vs. analytical language Imitative behaviors/role reversal imitation Use of Symbols Symbolic equivalency

3 Mental states are said to have "intentionality" they are about or refer to things, Mental representations have semantic properties Imagination is a sequence of representations

4 Representational Ability Mind does not just copy reality, but provides a representation of the world (Tager- Flusberg) Close your eyes and describe this room. Is your description a direct copy or a representation? Are you processing at the representational level or at the perceptual level?

5 Systematizing: Baron-Cohen Inanimate objects have predictable actions that are processed visually These actions are successfully predicted based on physical characteristics and physical laws

6 Systemizing cont d Human behaviors are motivated by internal states that may not follow objective, predictable patterns ToM is dependant on perceiving others as like me. (Metsoff and Moore 1995) Persons must simulate internal states of others through motor, cognitive, and emotional representations.

7 Theory of Mind Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.

8 Joint Attention,ToM and Play Basis of joint attention-involves ability to respond and use visual signals and conventional gestures for sharing attention Child must read cues to extend invitations and gain entry into social groups e.g., My turn Subtext is I expect you to set aside your agenda while I take a turn because I expect that you will know that this will please me

9 Joint Attention and ToM Joint attention requires understanding of intent and the ability to plan communicative intent Egocentric stage (Tomasello)Pre-9month old has a relationship to an object or an adult, but not to the intent of the interaction among the three Post 9 months the triad becomes significant, the child recognizes the intent of the adult, and begins to recognize the other mind

10 ToM Metarepresentational cognition Capacity of one individual to mentally represent the mental representations of another Allows one to mentally represent the psychological status of others Poor ToM is an interference to correctly identifying the communicative intent of others

11 Two Theories of ToM Simulation Theory The ability to interpret others actions through simulation Places one in the mental shoes of another and allows for understanding of the thoughts emotions and intentions behind their behavior

12 Two Theories of ToM Theory-theory Individuals develop ToM during the first few years of life by testing rules regarding the functions of objects and organisms they interact with and develop a cognitive theory of what others are thinking (Gopnik & Meltzoff,1997)

13 False Belief Task (Baron-Cohen) Meta representational component: Child thinks about where the other person thinks the object is. Typical 3-5 year olds can disregard own knowledge to solve this problem Children with ADS more likely to demonstrate representational deficits on social-cognitive tasks than on analogous non-social cognitive tasks Problem solving is more linear when not having to factor in the intentions or expectations of another. (Leekam & Perner; Leslie & Thaiss; Scott & Baron-Cohen).

14 ToM cont d ToM difficulties result in poor usage of: Denial negation Use of wh questions Provision of new information for conversational repairs ToM is fundamental to: Perspective taking, empathy, sharing, comforting

15 ToM cont d ToM impacts on ability to add new information and extend a conversational topic over several conversational turns Difficulty stems from a lack of awareness that communication exceeds just achieving goals, but also to exchange and clarify information (Tager-Flusberg)

16 Attention There are two components to attention: Selection-choosing what to attend to and shifting among several foci Allocation-the amount of time and effort needed to maintain that focus

17 Repetitive Behaviors ( Stimming ) Children with ASD may engage in repetitive behaviors e.g., spinning, hand flapping, tapping, to provide a focus that enables them to exclude disorganizing or threatening environmental input (Baranek, Foster, and Berkson)

18 Working Memory Simultaneous processing and storage of information Critical for integrating transient, context specific information from diverse sources (Pennington & Ozonoff)

19 Inhibition Ability to stop oneself from from carrying out a well-practiced and ready response when that response is not adaptive. (Rogers & Bennetto) ASD individuals are found to inhibit well on simple cognitive and motor tasks but have more difficulty inhibiting when required to shift attention to a new stimuli. (Hughes)

20 Cognitive Flexibility Shifting attention from one stimulus to another Shifting focus from one idea to another Poor set shifting results in perseveration of thoughts and actions

21 Executive Difficulties and Stimulus Overselectivity Stimulus Overselectivity: tendency to focus on a small, often irrelevant subset of cues (Twachtman- Cullen) Is this a deficit in the selection and allocation of attention? Results in restricted concept development Tendency for missing forest for the trees (Frith) Interferes with organizing discrete parts into a cohesive whole

22 Automaticity in ASD Intact EF behaviors support development of automaticity Lack of organizational strategies, and/or poor time-effective processing, leads to reduced automaticity. Reduction in automaticity leads to poor recall, poor adaptive learning strategies, and less opportunity to access HOT (Ameli, Courchesne, Lincoln, Kaufman, & Grillion)

23 Referential Indeterminancy (Quine) With no common view, novel expressions can not be accurately interpreted as: A reference to an event A participant in an event Some part of the participant s body Other referents

24 Continuum of Flexibility in Imitation Copying surface behaviors literally Copying what others are trying to do, not what they are actually doing Ability to read intention is the critical construct

25 Role Reversal Imitation How does the process of observation interact with the child s broader skills of cognition and social interaction How is observational learning specifically impacted by the child s ability to read the intentions of others (Carpenter, Tomasello & Striano)

26 Role reversal imitation- imitatively learning a communicative convention means imagining myself in the adult s role and enacting the action Requires: Understanding communicative intentions Role reversal imitation-using the symbol in the same way as the adult and for the same communicative purpose as the adult used it towards them Child learns to take a perspective on an object different from his own

27 Social Pragmatic view is that children must: Live in a world that has structured social activities Understand their role within a structure that they understand

28 Find the splark Response /termination Plox the pencil Accidental/intentional

29 Cont d Children with ASD perform equally well on recall of nonsensical information as meaningful information when visual and auditory stimulus input was presented Typical children do better with meaningful series Above interpreted by Hermelin and O Connor as impairment in categorization and coding of information

30 Reenactment Reenactment is the linear repetition of a single event or sequence of events in anticipation of an associated outcome Reenactment is pre-symbolic May be necessary for some children with ASD to acquire communicative behaviors at the reenactment level before they become symbol users

31 Concept Formation How is new information generalized How is similarity perceived characteristics function

32 Whisk broom Associative Learning

33 Gestalt Language Forms Gestalt language forms are multiword utterances memorized and produced as single chunks (Peters, Prizant) Gestalt language involves little analysis of internal linguistic structure Results in little or no comprehension of the utterance

34 Analytical Language Forms Analytical forms involve the application of previously acquired linguistic rules Results in greater comprehension Also greater flexibility in generating utterances

35 Echolalia Observation indicates that most verbal individuals with ASD demonstrate a gestalt style of language acquisition in early utterances described as rigid echolalia. (Ricks and Wing) Inflexible information processing relying on memorization of unanalyzed chunks of speech as well as visual input. (Prizant,Wetherby and Schuler)

36 Echolalia cont d Analytical processing allows for reference to prior experiences interrelating relevant aspects for constructing meaning Gestalt processing is storage of information to be later reproduced in an identical fashion. (Fay and Schuler, Prizant)

37 Joint Attention Skills Children with ASD have deficits in joint attention skills including: Referential looking- gaze alteration between object and adult( Charman et al.) Declarative pointing and showing-looking where others look and point (Baron-Cohen) Social referencing

38 Joint attention and Language Acquisition (Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello) Children s emerging ability to engage in nonlinguistically mediated joint attentional activities with adults at approximately 1 year of age is integrally related to their emerging language skills. The above is noteworthy as it demonstrates the age correspondence between joint attention and the acquisition of first words

39 Referential Indeterminancy (Quine) With no common view, novel expressions can not be accurately interpreted as: A reference to an event A participant in an event Some part of the participant s body Other references

40 Communicative Intention and Language Learning Without understanding of communicative intention, language would be primarily learned associatively to specific items or situations, or through training and reinforcement e.g., requesting

41 Symbolic Communication The symbol stands for and is separate from its referent The symbol is used with intention Are symbols always representational?

42 Stimulus Equivalency Airplane Spoken word Written word Photograph Drawing Airport symbol All of the above should have equivalency

43 Levels of Representation Proxy 3-D photograph Photograph Picture Line drawing Spoken language Written language

44 Perceptual to Symbolic Matching Identical matching Tasks Matching to task Matching to concept

45 Perceptual vs. Symbolic Matching Tasks Identical match Can be a perceptual match Categorical match Symbolic-relies on stimulus equivalence Stimulus equivalence is a behavioral process that allows physically dissimilar objects to be treated equally, for example, when a child is able to relate the written word cat to the actual animal (e.g., Sidman, 1992; Sidman & Tailby, 1982).

46 Semantics Schematic Understanding: Background knowledge World Knowledge Procedural knowledge Vocabulary Lexical specific dog Intentional- all dogs have critical features that group them into a category

47 Comprehension Comprehension is the essence of language (Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994) Children with ASD have weakness in declarative knowledge (concept formation) Children with ASD have strength in procedural knowledge (knowledge for doing things) (Goldstein, Minshew, & siegel 1994)

48 Comprehension cont d Individuals with ASD have difficulty in metaphorical language Requires understanding of communicative intent, and a shared social reference Particularly difficult when the entire message is dependent on the intangible aspects of communicative behavior e.g., facial expression, tone and social understanding (Twachtman- Cullen, 1997)