Current research

Eye Movement in Dynamic and Static Scenes

Pattern of strengths and weaknesses found in children with ASD

How adolescents come to know about and understand their diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome and how it affects their lives.

How children with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome perceive the social world.

Patterns of motor proficiency in children and teenagers diagnosed with autism.

An investigation of face processing in children with Asperger Syndrome.

Eye Movement in Dynamic and Static Scenes

Dr. Hanna Kovshoff would be very interested to hear from any adult with autism who would like to take part in a psychology research project at the University of Southampton.

This project will investigate visual attention and eye movement. To examine what people attend to, they are going to record the eye movements of participants whilst they look at displays presented on a computer screen. The aim of this work is to understand the process of visual attention when people look at dynamic versus static scenes.

For further information, please see the attachment or email Hannah at H.Kovshoff@soton.ac.uk

Pattern of strengths and weaknesses found in children with ASD

A questionnaire has been developed by Emily Bennett, a postgraduate Psychology student, Dr. Pamela Heaton, a well-established autism researcher, and Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, noted for his work in psychometrics (all from Goldsmiths, University of London). This study aims to explore the pattern of strengths and weaknesses found in children with autism spectrum disorders in relation to everyday abilities. By asking parents/guardians of children who are on the spectrum to complete a short questionnaire, it is hoped that an understanding of this will be achieved. If you would be interested in taking part in this, please click here.

How adolescents come to know about and understand their diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome and how it affects their lives.

Beth Johnson, a Trainee Clinical Psychologist at Southampton University, is conducting a study which looks at how adolescents come to know about and understand their diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome and how it affects their lives. By carrying out this study, she hopes to inform professionals (such as Doctors, Educational Psychologists, Teachers and Clinical Psychologists) so that they have a greater understanding of the issues faced by adolescents with Asperger Syndrome, which may then serve to improve service provision. In order to do this study she needs to meet with and talk to adolescents aged 12-18 who have a formal diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome and are aware of their diagnosis.

If you and your son/daughter would like to know more about the study please contact Beth via e-mail (bj104@soton.ac.uk) or phone 07919 622 683 so that she can discuss the study with you further and send you additional information.

The School of Psychology and the ethics committee at Southampton University approve the study. Beth is working with Dr Tony Brown (Clinical Psychologist) and Professor Lucy Yardley (Health Psychology) of Southampton University on this study.

How children with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome perceive the social world.

Steven Stagg is currently running a series of studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, investigating how children with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome perceive the social world. He is hoping that high functioning children with Autism and children with Asperger's will take part in these studies.

The first study he is conducting investigates whether children prefer looking at scenes of social interaction. The participant spends about 15 minutes looking at images on a computer screen, whilst they do this their eye movements are recorded so he can see which images they prefer to look at. He will also take measures of your child's verbal and non-verbal IQ and a measure of social functioning.

Steven is looking for children with Asperger's between the ages of 8 and 10 and children with Autism between the ages of 10 and 14. If you would like further information please contact Steven by phone (07894 080082) and he will ring you back, or by email (s.stagg@gold.ac.uk).

Patterns of motor proficiency in children and teenagers diagnosed with autism.

As one of the aims of her PhD, Michelle Pratt, a PhD student at Goldsmiths College, University of London, is to investigate patterns of motor proficiency in children and teenagers diagnosed with autism. The project is aiming to investigate movement skill in children and adolescents aged six to 14 years who have been diagnosed with autism or developmental coordination disorder (DCD).

She would like to recruit children and adolescents diagnosed with autism or DCD aged between six and 14 years, who have no other identified diagnoses, and who can understand, are are comfortable with, verbal instructions in order to complete tasks.
Children will be asked to complete a number of tasks focusing on their movement skills. The main task will be to complete the 'Movement-ABC', which assesses movement skills in three areas: balance, ball skills and manual dexterity. Children will also be asked to complete further tasks focusing on their movement, which require different levels of planning to complete. Previous research has indicated that children who have been diagnosed with autism may experience difficulties with movement, yet currently the precise extent and type of these problems has not been fully investigated. The project will investigate whether children diagnosed with autism experience specific difficulties with movement and the extent to which movement skills in this group are influenced by the level of planning required to complete a task. All participants will be matched using measures of general cognitive ability and language ability to children of the same age who have not been diagnosed with autism or DCD. This will help the research team to assess if differences in movement skills are apparent across the two groups.

If you would like further information please Michelle by phone (020 7717 2226) or email: m.pratt@gold.ac.uk.

An investigation of face processing in children with Asperger Syndrome.

This is a report from Southampton University researcher, Katherine Cornes. She undertook some research with members of our branch in 2006.

Background
Psychological research has investigated face processing in children with Asperger Syndrome. The aim of this research is to increase our understanding of social interaction in this group of individuals. Research investigating face processing abilities in children and adolescents with Asperger Syndrome has been somewhat contradictory. Some researchers suggest that individuals with Asperger Syndrome process faces differently compared with typically developing groups and other research has not found any differences.

Research that has highlighted differences between individuals with and without Asperger Syndrome has explored face processing using experimental tasks that place high demands on memory and attention. Although these tasks have shown some interesting results, it is often difficult to determine whether differences between groups reflect differences in face processing. Alternatively, it is possible that individuals with Asperger Syndrome find it more difficult to remember complicated images. Other research has shown that if simple tasks are used (those that do not rely on memory ability), then individuals with Asperger Syndrome perform similarly to other groups.

Our study
Our task asked individuals to judge whether an upright or an oriented face dominated an image. This task does not require children to remember faces. Our earlier work has shown that as a face becomes more oriented, then children and adolescents are less likely to say that it is the dominant image. We think that because children have more experience with upright faces in the environment their brains process these faces more efficiently.

The aim of the study was to explore whether children and adolescents with Asperger Syndrome process faces differently. If they did, then we would expect to see that this group of individuals would show a preference for always selecting the oriented face.

Results
Our results showed that there were no differences between children with Asperger Syndrome and a control group of children. This suggests that when simple tasks are used, then children with Asperger Syndrome process faces in the same way as other individuals.

Future research
Our research so far has been unable to show that individuals with Asperger Syndrome process faces differently to other groups in experimental settings. These results raise the question as to whether it is possible to show differences between individuals with Asperger Syndrome and other groups in face processing tasks in more naturalistic contexts. In our future work we would like to explore whether children and adolescents with Asperger Syndrome are less motivated to look at faces compared with other groups of children.

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