Persons with autism (n = 28) or Down syndrome (n = 30) took part in a study of the ability to detect intermodal correspondence between facial and vocal/linguistic information for affect. Participants viewed 24 split-screen images of an individual talking and displaying a different affect on each side of the display (happy, sad, angry, surprised, or neutral). The vocal track, matching one affect (i.e., one side of the split-screen) but not the other, was played from a central speaker. Subjects were asked to point to the side matching the vocal track. The vocal track was desynchronized with both sides, so that rhythmic synchrony was greatly reduced and subjects must use affect to make their choices. In the first control condition, rhythmic synchrony information was restored. In a second control condition, inanimate objects and their sounds were presented. In the experimental condition, when verbal mental age and IQ were taken into account, the autism group performed more poorly than did the Down syndrome group in detecting intermodal correspondence of face and voice. When rhythmic synchrony information was available, both groups' performances improved, with the Down syndrome group performing slightly better than the group with autism. There were no group differences in the condition using inanimate objects. Results suggest that persons with autism may have difficulty detecting intermodal correspondence of facial and vocal/linguistic affect.

Shifts in covert visual attention were compared in children with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to determine if children with ADHD have developmental immaturities in covert attention, relative to their non-ADHD peers. Children were told to orient attention to a central fixation point and were then cued, by both central and peripheral cues, to direct their attention to either the left or right peripheral fields. Following variable time intervals, the target appeared and reaction times and errors were recorded. Although performance of all subjects showed faciliation when attention was directed by valid cues and inhibition when attention was directed by invalid cues, the performance of children with ADHD was far more disrupted when their attention was misled by invalid cues, especially at longer intervals. This inconsistency was reflected in significantly higher error rates in the ADHD group. They also showed a pattern of attentional “waxing and waning” in performance over longer time intervals that has been previously found in auditory attention switching over time within trials in children with ADHD. Overall, results are inconsistent with developmentally immature covert attention skills in ADHD. Findings are discussed in terms of the concept of global “developmental immaturity” in the attention skills of children with ADHD.

This study investigated the ability of high-functioning verbal adolescents with autism or Down's syndrome to perform a referential communication task. It was predicted that autistic subjects would require more specific prompting to convey needed information to a listener than would subjects with Down's syndrome of the same verbal level. Subjects, 13 with autism and 14 with Down's syndrome, matched on verbal mental age, learned a simple board game, and were asked to teach it to a listener who used varying levels of prompting to elicit target information. Most subjects in the autistic group required specific prompting to produce the target information, whereas most subjects with Down's syndrome did not. Response adequacy was significantly higher in the Down's syndrome group than in the autistic group at the most general prompt level. Subjects with Down's syndrome used more gesture at the most general prompt level and when producing high adequacy responses, whereas subjects with autism used more gesture when producing low adequacy responses.

This study examined elicited (posed) affective expressions in children, adolescents, and young adults with autism (N = 18) or Down's syndrome (N = 24). Subjects were asked to (a) imitate five modeled expressions (Imitation task) and (b) produce five labeled expressions (Expression task). Subjects with autism produced recognizable expressions in both tasks, but they produced fewer than did subjects with Down's syndrome when target emotions were labeled but not modeled (Expression). Imitation and Expression tasks were equally difficult for subjects with autism, but subjects with Down's syndrome performed better in Expression than in Imitation. In both tasks, the responses of subjects with autism contained many unusual behaviors, such as bizarre expressions and those that looked “mechanical.” Results suggest that producing elicited affective expressions is more difficult for persons with autism than for persons with Down's syndrome of similar chronological age, mental age, and IQ.

A cross-sectional and a longitudinal study of 2-year-old children was performed to investigate the developmental relationship between understanding differences in spatial point of view and correct comprehension and production of I/you pronouns. In Study I only those children who demonstrated understanding that individuals' points of view can differ had begun to master speaker's point of view, as shown by correct use of some of the pronouns. Only children with complete understanding of points of view were able to use all I/you pronouns without errors. In Study 11 no child used the set of I/you pronouns without errors until s/he had complete understanding of points of view. Across children, a given pronoun tended not to be free of errors until the child understood that points of view can differ. Results are interpreted to support the hypothesis that understanding spatial points of view is a cognitive prerequisite to understanding speaker's point of view, which governs the pragmatics of 11 you pronouns.

Attentional functioning was examined in three groups of 7- to 19-year-old male participants with hemophilia: (1) HIV seronegative controls (HIV−, N = 66), (2) HIV seropositive participants with CD4+ lymphocyte counts greater than or equal to 200 (HIV+ CD4+ ≥200, N = 79), and (3) severely immune suppressed HIV seropositive participants (HIV+ CD4+ <200, N = 28). Two measures sensitive to attention deficits were used: the Continuous Performance Test (CPT) and the Span of Apprehension (Span). On the CPT, there was a decrement in attention in both HIV+ groups, as indexed by an increase in false alarm rate from Block 1 to Block 3, that was not present in the HIV− group. The longer the HIV+ children were required to sustain attention to the CPT, the more they responded to the incorrect stimulus. This effect decreased as age increased. Span percent correct and latency to correct were associated with the presence of a premorbid history of intracerebral hemorrhage, but were not sensitive to HIV status or degree of immune suppression in the HIV+ children, suggesting morbidity related to hemophilia. The remaining CPT and Span variables—hit rate, sensitivity, latency, percent correct, and latency to correct—showed the expected associations with age, but none showed conclusive associations with HIV status or immune suppression in the HIV+ participants. (JINS, 2000, 6, 443–454.)

This study examined the roles of verbal and nonverbal sources of information in the ability ofpersons with and without autism to recognize emotion. Child, adolescent, and young adultparticipants in four groups [Lower Functioning Autism (LFA) (n = 17), HighFunctioning Autism (HFA) (n = 18), Lower Functioning Comparison (LFC)(n = 18), and High Functioning Comparison (HFC) (n = 23)]identified emotions shown (happy, angry, sad, surprised, or neutral) in video clips of individualsexpressing emotion verbally, nonverbally, or both. Verbal expressions of emotion were eitherExplicit, Implicit, or Neutral, whereas nonverbal expressions were Animate or Flat (3 × 2).Pairwise ANCOVAs indicated no group differences between HFA and HFC groups or betweenthe LFA and LFC groups, and indicated instead group differences between higher and lowerfunctioning persons. With groups collapsed into High Functioning (HF) and Lower Functioning(LF), significant group differences were found. Performance of LF individuals suggested theyhad difficulty inferring how a person felt based on what the person said, if the emotion was notexplicitly named. Performance of HF individuals suggested they relied more on nonverbal thanon verbal information to determine a speaker's emotion, except where the emotion wasexplicitly named. Results suggested that persons with autistic spectrum disorders can useaffective information from multiple sources in much the same ways as persons of comparabledevelopmental level without autism.