This study examined the treatment efficacy of "PEERS"® (Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills) among Chinese adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Hong Kong. The original "PEERS"® manual was translated into Chinese, and cultural adjustments were made according to a survey among 209 local…

We evaluated the effects of operant discrimination training (ODT) on the vocalizations of 3 boys with autism. We compared ODT to a stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) condition and a control condition in an adapted alternating-treatments design. ODT increased the target vocalizations of all participants compared to the control condition, and its…

We compared judgements of the simultaneity or asynchrony of visual stimuli in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically-developing controls using Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Two vertical bars were presented simultaneously or non-simultaneously with two different stimulus onset delays. Participants with ASD distinguished…

Preferential attention to biological motion can be seen in typically developing infants in the first few days of life and is thought to be an important precursor in the development of social communication. We examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) aged 3-7 years preferentially attend to point-light displays depicting…

Early detection methods for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in infancy are rapidly advancing, yet the development of interventions for infants under two years with or at-risk for ASD remains limited. In order to guide research and practice, this paper systematically reviewed studies investigating interventions for infants under 24 months with or…

This study investigates whether distinct neurodevelopmental disorders show distinct patterns of impairments in particular grammatical abilities and the relation of those grammatical patterns to general language delays and intellectual disabilities. We studied two disorders (autism and Williams syndrome [WS]) and two distinct properties (Principle…

Recent studies provide credence to the minicolumnar origin of several developmental conditions, including dyslexia. Characteristics of minicolumnopathies include abnormalities in how the cortex expands and folds. This study examines the depth of the gyral white matter measured in an MRI series of 15 dyslexic adult men and eleven age-matched…

Key theories of autism implicate orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) compromise, while olfactory identification (OI) deficits are associated with OFC dysfunction. This study aimed to complete a 5-year follow-up of children with high-functioning autism (HFA) who previously lacked the normal age-OI association; and compare unirhinal-OI in children with HFA,…

The conjunction fallacy has been cited as a classic example of the automatic contextualisation of problems. In two experiments we compared the performance of autistic and typically developing adolescents on a set of conjunction fallacy tasks. Participants with autism were less susceptible to the conjunction fallacy. Experiment 2 also demonstrated…

Crawford and Howell (1998) have pointed out that the common practice of z-score inference on cognitive disability is inappropriate if a patient's performance on a task is compared with relatively few typical control individuals. Appropriate univariate and multivariate statistical tests have been proposed for these studies, but these are only valid…

When the author attended an Individualized Education Program (IEP) meeting for the 3-year-old son of a friend, she met a preschool service delivery team that was struggling to design interventions for a growing population of children being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It is within the context of this struggle that she was so…

Excitement and controversy have surrounded the effectiveness of Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) for young children with autism. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to investigate the effectiveness of EIBI based on applied behavior analysis in young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). There were 11 studies with 344…

The current study examined the association between prenatal pregnancy complications (PPC) and childhood psychiatric symptoms in children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and non-ASD children who were referred to a psychiatric clinic (Controls). Parents completed a "DSM-IV"-referenced rating scale and developmental history questionnaire.…

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…

This study evaluated "The Transporters", an animated series designed to enhance emotion comprehension in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). n = 20 children with ASC (aged 4-7) watched "The Transporters" everyday for 4 weeks. Participants were tested before and after intervention on emotional vocabulary and emotion recognition at three…