Comprehension of irony in autistic children: The role of theory of mind and executive function.

Although previous studies have examined irony comprehension in autistic children and potential impact factors, the relationship between theory of mind (ToM), executive function (EF), symptoms of autism, and comprehension of irony in this population remains largely unknown. This study explored irony comprehension in autistic children and examined the roles of ToM and EF in linking autism symptoms to deficits in irony comprehension. Twenty autistic children were compared with 25 typically developing (TD) children in an irony story picture task, ToM task, and EF task. The results showed that autistic children had impaired comprehension of irony compared with TD children, and performance on ironic stories showed a significant moderate discriminatory effect in predicting autistic children. A ToM deficit has also been proposed for autistic children. Comprehension of irony was significantly correlated with second-order ToM (2nd ToM) but was not significantly correlated with any components of EF. Moreover, 2nd ToM can predict the level of irony comprehension and mediate the relationship between symptoms of autism and irony comprehension. Taken together, these findings suggest that irony comprehension may offer a potential cognitive marker for quantifying syndrome manifestations in autistic children, and 2nd ToM may provide insight into the theoretical mechanism underlying the deficit in irony comprehension in this population.

Atypical facial mimicry for basic emotions in children with autism spectrum disorder.

During social encounters, people tend to reproduce the facial expressions of others, termed "facial mimicry," which is believed to underlie many important social cognitive functions. Clinically, atypical mimicry is closely associated with serious social dysfunction. However, findings regarding the facial mimicry ability of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are inconsistent; it is necessary to test whether deficits in facial mimicry are core defects of autism and explore the potential mechanism underlying this process. Using quantitative analysis, this study investigated voluntary and automatic facial mimicry performance of six basic expressions in children with and without ASD. There was no significant group difference in mimicry accuracy, but children with ASD showed less intensity in voluntary and automatic mimicry than typically developing children; they also presented less voluntary mimicry intensity for happy, sad, and fearful expressions. Performance on voluntary and automatic mimicry was significantly correlated with the level of autistic symptoms (r >-.43) and theory of mind (r >.34). Furthermore, theory of mind mediated the relationship between autistic symptoms and the intensity of facial mimicry. These results suggest that individuals with ASD show atypical facial mimicry (i.e., less intensity for both voluntary and automatic mimicry, mainly for voluntary mimicry of happiness, sadness, and fear), which might offer a potential cognitive marker for quantifying syndrome manifestations in children with ASD. These findings suggest that theory of mind plays a mediating role in facial mimicry, which may provide insight into the theoretical mechanism of social dysfunction in children with autism.

An intricate relationship between executive function and second-language ability in a cohort of Uyghur-Chinese bilingual children.

The relationship between executive function and second-language ability remains contentious in bilingual children; thus, the current study focused on this issue. In total, 371 Uyghur-Chinese bilingual children ranging from 3 to 6 years old were assessed by a battery of tasks measuring language ability (expressive vocabulary tests, receptive vocabulary tests, and phonological awareness of both their first-language and second-language) and executive function (working memory, inhibition, and switching). Our results indicated that age is a crucial moderator of the relationship between second-language ability and executive function. Specifically, executive function unilaterally predicted second-language ability in children who were 3-4 years old, whereas second-language ability and executive function bilaterally influenced each other in children who were 4-5 and 5-6 years old. These findings suggest that executive function and second-language ability have an intertwined and causal relationship among preschool children during development. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: A counterfactual model showed causality between executive function and second language ability in Uyghur-Chinese bilingual children. Executive function unilaterally predicted second language ability in the 3- to 4-year-old age group. Executive function and second language ability bilaterally influenced each other in the 4- to 5 and 5- to 6-year-old age groups.

Selective Impairment of Basic Emotion Recognition in People with Autism: Discrimination Thresholds for Recognition of Facial Expressions of Varying Intensities.

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by early onset qualitative impairments in reciprocal social development. However, whether individuals with ASD exhibit impaired recognition of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions is debatable. To investigate subtle deficits in facial emotion recognition, we asked 14 children diagnosed with high-functioning autism (HFA)/AS and 17 typically developing peers to complete a new highly sensitive test of facial emotion recognition. The test stimuli comprised faces expressing increasing degrees of emotional intensity that slowly changed from a neutral to a full-intensity happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, or fear expression. We assessed individual differences in the intensity of stimuli required to make accurate judgments about emotional expressions. We found that, different emotions had different identification thresholds and the two groups were generally similar in terms of the sequence of discrimination threshold of six basic expressions. It was easier for individuals in both groups to identify emotions that were relatively fully expressed (e.g., intensity > 50%). Compared with control participants, children with ASD generally required stimuli with significantly greater intensity for the correct identification of anger, disgust, and fear expressions. These results suggest that individuals with ASD do not have a general but rather a selective impairment in basic emotion recognition.

A selective impairment in extracting fearful information from another's eyes in Autism.

An atypical pattern of facial expression processing in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been discussed in previous studies. In this study, we systematically examined the hypothesis of selective abnormality of gaze pattern of in children with ASD using three emotion judgment "bubble" tasks. In this study, we used a data-driven driven technique, referred to as "Bubbles" to examine the hypothesis that ASD children will not show a general but rather a selective abnormality in extracting eyes information expressed by different emotions. Results indicated that similar to non-ASD individuals, ASD individuals used information from other people's eyes to judge happiness and anger. In contrast, ASD individuals showed a remarkable reduction in processing the eye region in fearful face, together with enhanced processing of the mouth, compared with the control group. The results suggest that a selective abnormality in extracting eyes information of fearful face without abnormality in processing eyes area of other basic facial emotions is a key and characteristic feature of autistic facial cognition. To our knowledge, this finding regarding the selective abnormality in extracting fearful information from another's eyes in ASDs has never been reported in previous studies and the information gathered as a part of this pilot research project has important clinical implications for social information processing training. For example, as children with ASD are more vulnerable to fear processing, training related to fear should be stressed. Autism Res 2016, 9: 1002-1011. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Can They See It? The Functional Field of View Is Narrower in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Although social cognitive deficits have long been thought to underlie the characteristic and pervasive difficulties with social interaction observed in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), several recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies have indicated that visual perceptual impairments might also play a role. People with ASD show a robust bias towards detailed information at the expense of global information, although the mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon remain elusive. To address this issue, we investigated the functional field of view in a group of high-functioning children with autism (n = 13) and a paired non-ASD group (n = 13). Our results indicate that the ability to correctly detect and identify stimuli sharply decreases with greater eccentricity from the fovea in people with ASD. Accordingly, a probe analysis revealed that the functional field of view in the ASD group was only about 6.62° of retinal eccentricity, compared with 8.57° in typically developing children. Thus, children with ASD appear to have a narrower functional field of view. These results challenge the conventional hypothesis that the deficit in global processing in individuals with ASD is solely due to weak central coherence. Alternatively, our data suggest that a narrower functional field of view may also contribute to this bias.

Lack of global precedence and global-to-local interference without local processing deficit: A robust finding in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder under different visual angles of the Navon task.

OBJECTIVE: The Navon effect (Navon, 1977) is an automatic tendency to process the global picture prior to local details when processing compound patterns. However, several recent studies have reported that this effect is lacking in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Although previous research has shown that the Navon effect is strongly affected by visual angles, whether this phenomenon will also be observed in ADHD is yet to be understood. We examine the lack of the Navon effect in ADHD under various visual angles to ensure that this phenomenon is not an artifact of saliency. METHOD: By employing three different visual angles for the local stimuli, global and local processing of Navon-type hierarchical letters was examined in participants with ADHD (n = 15) and a comparison group (n = 17). RESULTS: ADHD participants presented with a lack of the Navon effect without local processing deficit regardless of visual angle, in comparison to non-ADHD participants. CONCLUSION: A lack of global precedence and global-to-local interference without local processing deficit can be generalized in ADHD. This suggests that people with ADHD experience difficulties in processing the "whole picture," and it also challenges the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) criteria of ADHD in which the failure to pay close attention to details was emphasized. Moreover, the current results have important implications for understanding ADHD and could also have significant clinical value.

An fMRI study of the functional mechanisms of Stroop/reverse-Stroop effects.

Many previous behavioral inhibition studies have employed the classic Stroop and reverse-Stroop paradigm. Although an experimental dissociation has been demonstrated between Stroop interference (SI) and reverse-Stroop interference (RI), the mechanisms that underlie these phenomena remain unclear. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the functional mechanisms of SI and RI. We identified the brain regions activated by the Stroop word-color matching task using four tests: the Stroop control test (Test 1), Stroop test (Test 2), reverse-Stroop control test (Test 3), and reverse-Stroop test (Test 4). Neuroimaging results revealed that SI elicited activation in the bilateral middle frontal gyrus (BA9). In contrast, a number of other regions, including the bilateral middle frontal gyrus (BA 9 and BA10), medial frontal gyrus (BA 8), and cingulate gyrus (BA6 and BA 32) exhibited significant activation during RI. Our results indicate that there is a dissociation between the types of interference and brain activation. These findings suggest that SI and RI interference can be attributable to different neural mechanisms. It also suggests that the prefrontal cortex and the cingulate cortex are differentially sensitive to various types of interference, and that the reverse-Stroop task may be more useful than the Stroop task for evaluating interference control in psychiatric patients with frontal dysfunction.

Selective attention to facial emotion and identity in children with autism: evidence for global identity and local emotion.

The present study sought to test the global-identity and local-emotion processing hypothesis in face perception by examining emotional interference in face perception in children with high-functioning autism/Asperger's syndrome. Participants judged either the expression or the identity of faces while identity/expression was either held constant or varied (Garner paradigm). The results revealed that emotional expressions interfered with identity processing in face perception for autism spectrum disorder individuals. Taken together with previous findings, our results suggest that emotion judgment mainly depends on local processing, while identity judgment mainly depends on global processing.

The interference of local over global information processing in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder of the inattentive type.

A classic finding in perception of compound patterns is normal individuals cannot skip global analysis in local-oriented processing, but they can successfully resist local analysis in global-oriented processing-the so-called global interference [1]. Recently, studies examining the role of brain hemisphere activity in the Navon task have indicated that the processing of global and local information can be, respectively, attributed to the right and left hemispheres. Moreover, many neuroimaging researches have revealed that certain core symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are related to dysfunction of right hemisphere. These findings imply that global interference will be substantially less evident, and possibly even replaced by local interference in ADHD. The present study compared the performance of children with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder of the inattentive type (ADHD-I) in the processing of global and local information to examine the local interference hypothesis in ADHD. An ADHD-I group (n=15) and a paired control group (n=19) completed tasks using two versions of the Navon task, one requiring divided attention, in which no information was given to participants regarding the level at which a target would appear, and the other requiring selective attention, in which participants were instructed to attend to either the local or the global level. The results showed that children with ADHD-I exhibited local interference, regardless of which attention procedure was used. These results support the weak right hemisphere hypothesis in ADHD, and provide evidence against the deficit hypotheses for ADHD in the DSM-IV criteria [29], which postulates that inattention symptoms may manifest as a failure to provide close attention to details.

Do the eyes have it? Extraction of identity and positive expression from another's eyes in autism, probed using "Bubbles".

BACKGROUND: It has been debated whether attending to a particular facial region, such as the eyes, is impaired in children with autism. The purpose of this study was to verify the poor eye gaze hypothesis postulating that children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA)/AS are impaired in their ability to attend to another's eyes. METHODS: Our study used the "Bubbles" method. A group with ASD (n=15) and a paired non-ASD group (n=18) completed an identity judgment task requiring a binary judgment of the identity of a person in an image, and an emotion judgment task requiring perception of expressed happiness in a facial image. RESULTS: Results indicated that similar to non-ASD individuals, ASD individuals used information from other people's eyes to judge identity as well as emotion, and performed as successfully as the non-ASD group both in identity and emotion judgment tasks. The results challenge the conventional hypothesis that individuals with ASD cannot attend to or derive information from another's eyes. CONCLUSION: Our findings combined with the results of poor eye gaze to expressions of fear in previous studies suggest that ASD individuals can derive information pertaining to positive emotion, but cannot sufficiently extract information pertaining to negative emotion from another's eyes.

An asymmetric stroop/reverse-stroop interference phenomenon in ADHD.

OBJECTIVE: To examine whether participants with ADHD showed a deficit in Stroop/reverse-Stroop interference by comparing them to non-ADHD participants. METHOD: A group with ADHD, primarily inattentive type (n = 15), and a paired non-ADHD group (n = 15) completed the group version of the Stroop/reverse-Stroop test. RESULTS: Asymmetric interference was observed between the Stroop test and the reverse-Stroop test in ADHD participants, presenting evidence contrary to Barkley's behavioral inhibition model of ADHD in which response inhibition deficits pertained only to the ADHD-C subtype. CONCLUSION: Participants with ADHD showed a control deficit in reverse-Stroop interference but not in Stroop interference.