Neural plasticity, joint attention, and a transactional social-orienting model of autism

Mundy, Peter; Neal, Adrian

doi:10.1016/s0074-7750(00)80009-9

Cited by 224 publications

(171 citation statements)

References 93 publications

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“…Although we made three predictions, the first two of these might have been anticipated on the basis of previous research and0or alternative theoretical perspectives~e.g., Swettenham et al, 1998;Mundy & Neal, 2001!, and it was the third that was more specifically derived from our hypothesis. The first prediction concerned the motivation and propensity to engage with other people: we predicted that relative to matched children without autism, children with autism would be rated as spending more time looking at the objects, and less time looking at the tester, in the course of a test of imitation.…”

Section: Hypothesis and Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, at this level of description, one might consider the group difference to reflect a distinction in terms of social orientation~Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling, Rinaldi, & Brown, 1998;Mundy & Neal, 2001!. Third, it is not clear whether the results reflect something enduring about individual differences among participants, something about the connection between their pattern of engagement in this particular setting and their imitative performance, or some mixture of the two. For instance, one can imagine that on a given day an individual of either group might feel less than usually inclined to become involved with the tester, and for this reason deploy his or her attention to the objects of the task and as a result fail to imitate self-0other orientation.…”

Section: Identification: the Missing Link?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identification: The missing link between joint attention and imitation?

Hobson

2007

Develop. Psychopathol.

106

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In this paper we outline our hypothesis that human intersubjective engagement entails identifying with other people. We tested a prediction derived from this hypothesis that concerned the relation between a component of joint attention and a specific form of imitation. The empirical investigation involved "blind" ratings of videotapes from a recent study in which we tested matched children with and without autism for their propensity to imitate the self-0other-orientated aspects of another person's actions. The results were in keeping with three a priori predictions, as follows:~a! children with autism contrasted with control participants in spending more time looking at the objects acted upon and less time looking at the tester;~b! participants with autism showed fewer "sharing" looks toward the tester, and although they also showed fewer "checking" and "orientating" looks, they were specifically less likely to show any sharing looks; and, critically,~c! within each group, individual differences in sharing looks only! were associated with imitation of self-other orientation. We suggest that the propensity to adopt the bodily anchored psychological stance of another person is essential to certain forms of joint attention and imitation, and that a weak tendency to identify with others is pivotal for the developmental psychopathology of autism.

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Section: Hypothesis and Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Identification: the Missing Link?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification: The missing link between joint attention and imitation?

Hobson

2007

Develop. Psychopathol.

106

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“…interaction may be intrinsically rewarding; Mundy and Neal, 2000;Schilbach et al, 2010;Pfeiffer et al, 2014), one component of successful social interaction is the creation of a shared psychological state between partners (Clark, 1996;Sperber and Wilson, 1996;Tomasello et al, 2005). Consistent with this perspective, recent behavioral (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Perceived live interaction modulates the developing social brain

Rice

Moraczewski

Redcay³

2016

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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Although children's social development is embedded in social interaction, most developmental neuroscience studies have examined responses to non-interactive social stimuli (e.g. photographs of faces). The neural mechanisms of real-world social behavior are of special interest during middle childhood (roughly ages 7-13), a time of increased social complexity and competence coinciding with structural and functional social brain development. Evidence from adult neuroscience studies suggests that social interaction may alter neural processing, but no neuroimaging studies in children have directly examined the effects of live social-interactive context on social cognition. In the current study of middle childhood, we compare the processing of two types of speech: speech that children believed was presented over a real-time audio-feed by a social partner and speech that they believed was recorded. Although in reality all speech was prerecorded, perceived live speech resulted in significantly greater neural activation in regions associated with social cognitive processing. These findings underscore the importance of using ecologically-valid and interactive methods to understand the developing social brain.

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“…Several cognitively oriented theories, such as executive dysfunction theory (e.g., Hughes et al 1994;Pennington and Ozonoff 1996;Hill 2004) and weak central coherence theory (Frith and Happe´1994), postulate that cognitive impairments are the underlying cause of autistic symptomatology. On the other hand, socially oriented theories propose that abnormalities in social perception, social cognition, and social motivation cause subsequent failures of language and cognitive development in autism (e.g., Dawson et al 1998;Mundy and Neal 2001;Klin et al 2002). Both of these theoretical positions are plausible and have considerable supporting evidence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

fMRI Investigation of Working Memory for Faces in Autism: Visual Coding and Underconnectivity with Frontal Areas

et al. 2007

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Brain activation and functional connectivity were investigated in high functioning autism using functional magnetic resonance imaging in an n-back working memory task involving photographic face stimuli. The autism group showed reliably lower activation compared with controls in the inferior left prefrontal area (involved in verbal processing and working memory maintenance) and the right posterior temporal area (associated with theory of mind processing). The participants with autism also showed activation in a somewhat different location in the fusiform area than the control participants. These results suggest that the neural circuitry of the brain for face processing in autism may be analyzing the features of the face more as objects and less in terms of their human significance. The functional connectivity results revealed that the abnormal fusiform activation was embedded in a larger context of smaller and less synchronized networks, particularly indicating lower functional connectivity with frontal areas. In contrast to the underconnectivity with frontal areas, the autism group showed no underconnectivity among posterior cortical regions. These results extend previous findings of abnormal face perception in autism by demonstrating that the abnormalities are embedded in an abnormal cortical network that manages to perform the working memory task proficiently, using a visually oriented, asocial processing style that minimizes reliance on prefrontal areas.

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Neural plasticity, joint attention, and a transactional social-orienting model of autism

Cited by 224 publications

References 93 publications

Identification: The missing link between joint attention and imitation?

Identification: The missing link between joint attention and imitation?

Perceived live interaction modulates the developing social brain

fMRI Investigation of Working Memory for Faces in Autism: Visual Coding and Underconnectivity with Frontal Areas

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