Overview
This presentation is aimed at informing you about the developmental disorder that is autism. Focusing on autism and theory of mind.
Overview
This presentation is aimed at identifying what autism is.
How autism develops in children.
How autistic children develop their communication skills.
Autism and the ‘theory of mind’.
The neuropsychology of autism.
What is autism?
Bailey et al., (1996) describes autism as a developmental disorder characterised by three features: language abnormality, social abnormality and stereotypical and repetitive patterns of behaviour.
The first known report of autism was made in an article by Leo
Kanner in 1943, in which he described the core of the classification of autism that we still use today.
Autism and developing communication skills
Many people who have autism develop problems in the relationships which they have with other people, and forming relationships with others, as they can find interacting with other people difficult.
Socially both adults and children who have autism can find it hard and confusing to understand social cues.
Autism and developing communication skills
At times children who suffer from autism can appear to be distant and uninvolved in the things that are going on around them such as playing with friends and communicating with their parents.
As a result of this some people can tend to deem a child who suffers from autism to unresponsive emotionally and when it comes to communicating with others.
This is due to the fact that one of the main characteristics of autism in a child is that they do not have the ability to distinguish emotion in the way in which the people around them behave or in their expressions.
Autism and developing communication skills.
Bailey et al (1996) says that an autistic person could also shows signs of having difficulty in maintaining a topic of conversation.
There are serious delays in the language development in a person who has autism. This results in nearly half of autistic people having problems in communicating how they feel verbally and communicate verbally with others, adding to poor communication skills.
Rutter (1987) has argued that these poor communication skills arise from the autistics impaired ability to use feedback.
The development of autism
Many autistic people display repetitive behaviour which sees them relying on sticking to rituals and routines almost to an obsessive level. Most of the time this is a stereotypical occurrence amongst people who suffer from autism.
This reliance on ritual also sees the person developing an abnormal attachment to certain objects. This latter bullet point joins in with the fact that a lot of children with autism are unable to just play spontaneously with toys. This could be due to the fact that an autistic child may not know what the toy means or is for, and therefore become attached to the objects that they know and trust, and would prefer to stick to what they know.
The development of autism
Autism develops within the first two years of a person’s life and is up to four times common in boys than it is in girls. However autism may recede when the child develops language and uses their language skills to communicate socially.
The development of autism
According to Swettenham et al, (1998) early signs of a person having autism include a failure to maintain eye-to-eye contact with other people.
In a study carried out by Rutter (1979) and again by Rapin
(1997) it was found that up to 75% of cases of people who have autism also suffer from mental retardation.
It has also been found in a study carried out by Venter et al
(1992) that whereas performance on some cognitive tasks is low performance on other tasks can be high .Some autistic people also exhibit exceptional abilities in specific areas such as reading, spelling, maths and music.
