We're still finishing up the fMRI work, and during the next few months we're going to be expanding our autism sample, and recruiting a new sample of age and sex matched controls.
We also want to examine data from frontal regions, and relate the levels of these effects to behavioural measures.
For the longer term, we've designed a task to look more explicitly at the attentional phenomenon of late suppression, and we also want to look at younger ages and at siblings.
The examination of siblings is particularly interesting because many non-autistic siblings share some autistic cognitive traits.
Siblings may thus offer a glimpse of some of the underlying attentional traits of autism, uncomplicated by the full syndrome of autism.
Siblings:
- superior spatial and verbal span
- poor set-shifting
- poor planning
- poor verbal fluency
Other relatives:
- Embedded Figures
- inferring mental state from facial expression
- pragmatic language
- personality: rigidity, aloofness, anxiety
- disparity between VIQ and PIQ
`Physiological Studies of Attention in Autism: Implications for Autistic Cognition and Behaviour', Matthew Belmonte, 26 January 2002
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