U Frith

..A recent study has found that autistic people donate the same to charity regardless of whether they are observed. This is not because they are oblivious to others, but because they are free of hypocrisy...

..The brain abnormality that results in mentalizing failure in autism may involve weak connections between components of this system...

..The use of deliberate social signals can serve to increase reputation and trust and facilitates teaching. This is likely to be a critical factor in the steep cultural ascent of mankind...

..The results support the hypothesis that specialised substrates, which underlie literacy acquisition, have limited plasticity and may be more strongly lateralised to the left hemisphere in males than in females...

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..Hans Asperger drew attention to individuals who show the core symptoms of autism in the presence of high verbal intelligence...

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..These findings indicate that different domains of the visual memory system can be fractionated developmentally. In particular, it demonstrates that topographical memory can develop independently from other aspects of visual memory...

..These observations suggest that the ability to mentalize has evolved from a system for representing actions...

..These regions are part of a network that has been consistently activated when people are asked to think about the mental states of others. Activation of this network is independent of arousal as measured by changes in pupil diameter...

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..These findings suggest that there are dissociable subcomponents to social cognition and that not all of these are compromised in Asperger Syndrome...

..This was not the case for individuals with Asperger syndrome (n = 19). Thus, these individuals do not attribute mental states spontaneously, but they may be able to do so in explicit tasks through compensatory learning...

..This was a different region from a more anterior, inferior dorsal mPFC region that responded to intentional causality. This suggests that different regions of mPFC play different roles in thinking about intentions...

..This study corroborates the finding from a recent imaging study, that the most posterior part of left hemispheric BA37 has a necessary role in object recognition...

..We speculate that the development of these high level social signalling systems goes hand in hand with the development of consciousness...

..Finally, the human brain has the unique ability to represent the mental states of the self and the other and the relationship between these mental states, making possible the communication of ideas...

..Such an explanation may also provide a link between perceptual abnormalities and specific deficits in social cognition associated with autism...

..Visual stress seems to account for a small proportion of dyslexics, independently of the commonly reported phonological deficit. However, there is little evidence for a causal role of auditory, motor or other visual impairments...

..We discuss how these results may suggest a mechanism to explain the reduced salience of social stimuli in ASD...

..In this way, they provide an escape from the tyranny of strong emotions that are readily aroused in social interactions...

..We suggest that, as a result of learning to read and play keyboard music, pianists acquire vertical-to-horizontal visuomotor mappings that generalize outside the musical context...

..Here, we explore some of the reasons why social cognitive neuroscience is captivating the interest of many researchers. We focus on its future, and what we believe are priority areas for further research...

..In this review, we summarize recent work that has illuminated the neuro-cognitive basis of complex social interaction and communication in humans...

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..We hypothesize that this effect can be understood in terms of overlapping neural systems for motor control and action-understanding if multiple models of possible observed and performed actions are processed...

..Thus, a mentalizing deficit may affect understanding of biologic agents even when this does not explicitly require understanding others' mental states...

..Learning of the sequence did not seem to depend on awareness of the sequence structure. These results suggest that automatic skill learning is intact in dyslexic individuals...

..Macrocephaly in the context of autism may therefore be a biological marker of abnormal neural connectivity, and of a local processing bias...

..In this paper, recent developments in the field of autism are outlined. In particular, we review the findings of the three main neuro-cognitive theories of autism: theory-of-mind deficit, weak central coherence and executive dysfunction...

..On the other hand, higher-level conscious processes are as likely to be selfish as prosocial...

..We speculate that this may arise because autistic individuals are unaware that they will also gain or lose reputation in their partner's eyes...

..These activations suggest that music reading involves the automatic sensorimotor translation of a spatial code (written music) into a series of motor responses (keypresses)...

..When subjects played melodies from musical notation after training, activation was seen in a cluster of voxels within the right superior parietal cortex consistent with the view that music reading involves spatial sensorimotor mapping...

..Possible reasons for the discrepancies between our results and neuroimaging studies are discussed. We conclude that our findings urge caution against using functional imaging as the sole method of establishing cognitive neuroanatomy...

..An abnormality in this process cannot therefore account for their tactile hypersensitivity...

..Depending on the direction of gaze, attractiveness can thus activate dopaminergic regions that are strongly linked to reward prediction, indicating that central reward systems may be engaged during the initiation of social interactions...

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..The activation of these components in concert appears to be critical to mentalizing...

..The individuals with autism spectrum disorders were significantly more impaired in their emotion processing and were more depressed than those in the control and relative groups...

..The findings provide a basis for the use of subthreshold stimulation over the extrarolandic speech disruption site in order to probe the functional properties of this area and to test psychological theories of linguistic function...

..The data is interpreted in terms of reduced sensitivity to agency cues in individuals with autism and general information processing capacity...

..The findings are interpreted within an interactive model of reading development in which problems in establishing a phonological pathway in dyslexic families may be compensated early by children who have strong language skills...

..Overall, the present data support the phonological theory of dyslexia, while acknowledging the presence of additional sensory and motor disorders in certain individuals...

..This finding suggests a physiological cause for the mentalizing dysfunction in autism: a bottleneck in the interaction between higher order and lower order perceptual processes...

..We hypothesize that information about articulatory movements for specific phonemes is less accessible to dyslexics because of a deficient phonological processing system...

..Tests administered included the Phonological Assessment Battery, postural stability, bead threading, finger to thumb and time estimation...

..Local bias appears not to be a mere side-effect of executive dysfunction, and may be independent of theory of mind deficits. Possible computational and neural models are discussed...

..In this enterprise she has encouraged psychologists to work in a theoretical framework that distinguishes between observed behaviour and the underlying cognitive and neurobiological processes that mediate that behaviour...

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..Our investigation points to a common neurological basis for deficits in word reading and picture naming in developmental dyslexia...

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..Instead, we suggest that these problems must be sought at a higher level of text processing...