1. Central Coherence Theory (Frith, 1989)
2. Executive Dysfunction Theory (McEvoy, Rogers,and Pennington, 1993)
3. Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith,1985)
这三个理论网上应该能找到。
1. Central Coherence Theory (Frith, 1989)
Michelle举例说：课堂上老师说“拼写考试”。所有的学生立刻拿出一张纸，折一半，在左边从上往下写下123。。，右上角写下日期和名字，并把纸标上“拼写考试”。一个高功能的自闭孩子什么也没做：他不知道“拼写考试”意味着除了写下老师念的字以外，还包括了写字前期后期的一系列相关的动作，（才能完成整个任务）。
學者Frith, U. and Happ, F. (1994) 認為「整體和重點思考能力」和上述第一項能力是不同的東西，但卻不能脫離第二項。第一項能力不是「整體和重點思考能力的缺失」的結果，但就第二項來說，如要理解別人的想法和感受，就必須考慮整個情景和組合各方面的資料，所以循自然或對情景敏感角度來量度理解社交行為能力，會很容易找到「整體和重點思考能力」所產生的作用。
Simon Baron-Cohen 的「想法解讀」理論加進了一個新的部分 - 「系統化處理機制」。它也涵蓋了自閉症人士對細節的特強觀察力。但在理解整個系統方面，「想法解讀」和「整體和重點思考能力」的缺失有不同的結論，根據「整體和重點思考能力」缺失的理論，自閉症人士應不能理解整個系統，與及它各個部分之間的關係。但「想法解讀」則說，只要這系統有規則可尋，自閉症人士很容易知道改變一個參數會為整個系統帶來什麼間接的後果。自閉症人士的重複性行為，源自他們對任何有規律的系統的強烈興趣，他們喜歡事物保持原狀，也許是在探究系統的規律或辨認物理因果關係。
Contents of the materials in the following section are either quoted or summarized from :
1. Vermeulen,P.(2001). Autistic Thinking – This is the title. London: Jessica Kingsley
2. Frith, U.(1989).Autism:explaining the enigma. Oxford:Blackwell
3. Happ, F. (2000). Parts and wholes, meaning and minds: central coherence and its relation to theory of mind Understanding Other Minds Second Edition Oxford : Oxford University Press
4. Baron-Cohen, S. (draft 4th May 2001). The exact mind: Empathising and systemizing in autism spectrum conditions? To appear in Goswami, U, (ed) Handbook of Cognitive Development. Blackwell:Oxford (in press)
What is ‘weak central coherence’?
In simplest terms, it refers to the individual’s preference for local detail over global processing. It means good segmentation skills and superior attention to details, as evidenced by Embedded Figures Task and Block Design Subtest. It also means an autistic deficit in integrating fragments of objects and integrating sentences within a paragraph, of which tests have also been made. (Simon Baron-Cohen, 2001)
Autistic people’s world is a fragmented world. In the word of a person with autism : ‘I compare autistic sight with the faceted vision of an insect: a host of different subtle details but all of it non-integrated.’
Central coherence, the ability to establish cohesion, is not something you are either born with or not. It is an ability that is developed, something people can acquire to a greater or lesser degree. It is wrong to think that people with autism entirely lack central coherence. It’s just that with them the ability is weakly developed: To further complicate things the degree of weakness of central coherence is not identical in all individuals with autism.
The misunderstanding about the talent of people with autism is the result of a mistaken understanding of intelligence. . Clearly, there are different kinds of intelligence. In what way is the structure of autistic people’s intelligence different from that of people without autism? .(Vermeulen, P. 2001).
In the normal cognitive system there is a built-in propensity to form coherence over as wide a range of stimuli as possible, and to generalize over as wide a range of contexts as possible. It is this capacity for coherence that is diminished in autistic children. As a result, their information-processing systems, like their very beings, are characterized by detachment. The normal operation of central coherence compels us human beings to give priority to understanding meaning. Hence, we can easily single out meaningful from meaningless material. .(Frith, U.,1989)
Frith explains further the concept of central coherence in the following:
We can draw on a simple model of the mind. The model is based on information-processing concepts. At its most basic this model of mind distinguishes central thought processes and more peripheral input and output processes. The peripheral processes are specialized for various domains, for instance speech. input devices transform sensations into perceptions going through many stages of processing. They can be thought of a custom-built, highly specialized modules. Their end-product is usable information, already interpreted. This information can be further interpreted by central thought processes. The central system too can provide many stages of processing in many specialized subsystems.
There might be a force which pulls together large amounts of information. The smaller amounts of information that eventually contribute to the larger picture too must be pulled together from even smaller amounts by some locally acting cohesive force. Local cohesive effects are very strong. Perhaps they are impossible to resist when they occur at a relatively peripheral level. Why should there be a centrally acting high-level cohesive force? Why is there a need to pull together information that is already processed and already interpreted? The answer might be: without this type of high-level cohesion, pieces of information would just remain pieces, be they small pieces or large pieces.
High-level central cohesive forces must be resistible to some extent. This is necessary in order to explain the achievement of disembedding.
A weak central cohesive force, weak relative to lower level cohesive forces, would simulate ‘field independence’ and all that it entails for performance on embedded figures.
Manifestations and explanations of autistic people’s abilities and behaviors in the ‘central coherence ‘context:
1. Good rote memory skills
In Word string tests – The meaning of a message to be repeated, or the structure of the pattern, the single most important feature for normal children, is not as significant for autistic children. They may remember unconnected words almost as well as meaningful sentences, and unconnected bits of information as well as those that are part of a meaningful context. It is this lack of preference for coherent over incoherent stimuli that must be regarded as abnormal.
The key word in rote memory is ‘rote’ as opposed to ‘meaningful’. Hence, it is appropriate to consider astounding isolated feats of rote memory of autistic children as a sign of dysfunction, rather than islets of intact ability.
2. Good spatial abilities
On the Embedded Figures test, autistic children scored above average for their mental age.(Shah and Frith,1983)
3. An ability to discriminate fine visual and auditory detail.
4. Problem of generalization – it is not the inability to categorize or inability to see similarities despite differences that prevents the application of learning. But perhaps it is an inability to see the need for generalization across differences. Not pulling information together in spite of perceived similarities might be traced to a weakness in a drive for central coherence.
Veumeulen : in your behavior you are oriented towards one particular detail and you fail to react when that detail happens to be absent from the situation – thus resulting in rigidity.
5. Attention control – incidental features of the environment can become an autistic person’s main focus of attention. That which is perceptually salient to most people may not be salient to an autistic child, and vice versa. An autistic individual can focus for a long time on a narrow topic for its own appeal, whereas a normal child would attend to it briefly, finding it interesting only as part of a greater pattern. It is probably only in the greater pattern that people share something of what they consider to have significant meaning.
6. Insistence on sameness – it is a type of local coherence. It is extremely limited in scope and quite self-contained. It can properly be called a thought stereotypy, a preoccupation of a highly repetitive nature.
7. Idiot savant – the ability depends on several factors; a capacity for sustained attention to one topic; the smooth running of specialized processing systems; and above all, repetitive activity.
8. Repetitive behavior – Repetition is the natural ‘setting’ for input and output systems, and that they are normally stopped from repeating when their products are acknowledged by a high-level central monitor. Such acknowledgement could be the signal for an input device to start processing new information and for output device to change to new action. The impaired brain, in the case of autism, would show a disengagement between central and peripheral devices, because the central control processes are too weak to control them and to switch them off appropriately.
9. Rigidity - flexibility is a quality particularly appropriate for a higher-level context using mechanism, but not for lower-level processing devices where reliability would be more important. From an evolutionary perspective it is obvious that the behavior of neurologically primitive organisms is rigidly programmed.
10. Pragmatics, idiosyncratic speech – picking up wrong meaning in a situation
Veumeulen : People with autism experience their greatest communication problem with what is not being said. Meaning is hidden within the context, which contains the information that is necessary to fully understand what is actually expressed. Because people with autism are slower in grasping context, they lack the information that is necessary to comprehend the whole. Often they react only to part of the whole.
11. Echolalia – the processing of speech seems to bypass involvement of central thought. Though they are perfect phonological, prosodic and syntactic units, these products do not become part of global meaning. Weak central coherence precludes the capacity to appreciate the deeper intentional aspects of communication.
12. Reversal use of ‘ I’ and’ you’, tenses, ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘come’ and ‘go’ – their use is relative to who is speaker and who is listener, therefore grasping of context is more difficult
13. Odd intonation, pitch, speech rate, fluency, word stress in speech – true intentional communication is impaired
14. Lack of a theory of mind – information from different sources, the results of seeing, remembering and telling, are all pulled together in a coherent interpretation of what happened. If it were not a coherent whole, perhaps because of a weak drive for coherence, but remained a complex set of separate pieces of information, then anybody would find it difficult. Improbable behavior is improbable because it does not belong to a coherent system of thought.
Implication : deficits in ToM were conceptualized as just one consequence of weak central coherence. Understanding social interaction and extracting the higher-level representation of thoughts underlying behavior, was seen as the pinnacle of coherent processing and gist extraction. Thus, people with autism were socially impaired because they were unable to derive higher-level meaning..
Mentalizing ability can be seen as a cohesive interpretative device par excellence: it forces together complex information from totally disparate sources into a pattern which has meaning. The ability which allows us to know that we know may be the key to the ability to make sense. (metarepresentation)
Veumeulen’s other interpretations of weak central coherence manifestations:
15. Difficulty in decision making. When autistic people are required to make choices, they see themselves confronted with a host of possible alternatives, as well as those alternatives that coherent thinkers have eliminated beforehand because they do not fit into the context of the whole.
16. Difficulty in dealing with various things at the same time. Information is processed ‘piece by piece’; their intelligence is characterized by ‘piecemeal processing’. In this, they need time to gain an understanding. They always have a delayed reaction time.
17. Lack of common sense – they assign meanings in an ‘idiosyncratic’ way (in contrast to ‘communal’).
18. Good memory of details – autistic people detect much less cohesion. They are dependent on their memory of details.
The Relationship between Weak central Coherence and ToM
Happ, F. (2000).
Non-social features of autism that ToM has limitations in explaining (as pointed out by Happ) :
1. restricted repertoire of interests
2. obsessive desire for sameness
3. stereotypies
4. savant abilities
5. lack of generalization
6. excellent rote memory
7. preoccupation with parts of objects
8. fragmented sensory perception
Experimental findings not accounted for by mind-blindness
assets deficits
Memory for word strings Memory for sentences
Memory for unrelated items Memory for related items
Echoing nonsense Echoing with repair
Pattern imposition Pattern detection
Jigsaw by shape Jigsaw by picture
Sorting faces by accessories Sorting faces by person
The central coherence account of autism, then, predicts skills as well as failures, and as such can best be characterized not as a deficit account, but in terms of cognitive style. As such it is better able than most accounts to explain the many things that people with autism are good at .
Weak central coherence characterizes the spontaneous approach or processing preference of people with autism, and for this reason is best captured in open-ended tasks, i.e. autistic people fail to use preceding sentence context to determine the pronunciation of homographs. When instructed in reading for meaning, group differences on the homograph disappear.
Later developments in explaining the relationship between Central Coherence and ToM
Frith and Happ (1994) modified their previous view and proposed as a working hypothesis that that the two aspects of autism, weak central coherence and impaired ToM, were independent (though interacting) facets of the disorder..
There is evidence, too, that the non-social features of autism persist even in the minority of people with autism who do develop some theory of mind ability (albeit with a significant delay). They still have self-injurious behavior and peculiar mannerism, tics, twitches, preoccupations, and equally high levels of insistence on sameness, circumscribed interests, and repetitive movement and language.
It suggests weak central coherence and ToM are distinct. Frith and Happ have not devised measures of them sensitive enough to degree of abnormality to reveal a true relation between the two.
It seems that there is indirect evidence which says that tasks that weak central coherence will excel such as Embedded Figures test correlate negatively with ToM tasks.
The relationship between ToM and weak central coherence depends on what is meant by ToM.
Happ proposed that ToM has 2 meanings, namely :
1. a basic ability to form representations capable of capturing prepositional attitudes (M-representations) – an ability which is necessary for passing false-belief tests.
2. there is the individual’s emergent social understanding, which is based on the ability to form m-representations in order to attribute mental states, but which is clearly also a function of many other characteristics including personality, motivation, empathy, intelligence, and environmental and experiental factors (e.g. Dunn et al. 1991)
In Frith and Happ’s current conceptualization, central coherence is independent from ToM in its former, but not its latter, meaning. The autistic impairment in forming m-representations is not the cause or result of weak central coherence. However, when we consider ToM in its second (and broader) sense, then social understanding cannot be considered independent of coherence – because in order to appreciate people’s thoughts and feelings in real life, one needs to take into account context and to integrate diverse information. So when we measure social understanding in a more naturalistic or context-sensitive way, we are likely to find a contribution from central coherence – and that individuals with weak central coherence and detail-focused processing are less successful in putting together the information necessary for sensitive social inference.
Another alternative in determining the relationship between central coherence and ToM is that they are casually connected. It is conceivable that integrative processing of environment provides the inputs necessary for the maturation of the ToM mechanism. It is also conceivable that our tendency for extraction of higher-level meaning is socially-mediated.
What does Simon Baron-Cohen say about weak central coherence in his new paper ‘The exact mind: Empathising and systemizing in autism spectrum conditions (in press draft 4th May 2001)?
Simon Baron-Cohen’s new ToM theory consists of 2 theories :
1. Empathising – it encompasses ToM, mind-reading, intentional stance and some affective reaction.
2. Systemising – it explains the repetitive behavior and obsessions and a superior ability in an initial analysis of the system (be it a technical system, a natural system, an abstract system, a social systems, SBC says systems are all around us in our environment and fall into the above 4 kinds) down to its lowest level of detail in order to identify potentially relevant parameters that may play a causal role in the behavior of the system.
SBC claims that systemizing in his new ToM theory embraces aspects of the central coherence theory, say excellent attention to detail. However they make opposite predictions when it comes to an individual with autism being able to understand a whole system, so long as there are underlying rules and regularities that can be discovered and he will readily grasp that a change of one parameter in one part of the system may have distant effects on another part of the system. This kind of reasoning clearly involves good central coherence of the system. In contrast, the central coherence theory should predict that he should fail to understand whole (global) systems or the relationships between parts of a system.
In explaining repetitive behavior, SBC says much of it involves the child’s obsessional or strong interests with mechanical systems or other systems that can be understood in terms of rules and regularities. This and what is often described as their “need for sameness” in attempting to hold the environment constant, might be signs of the child as a superior systemiser. The child might be conducting mini-experiments in his or her surroundings, in an attempt to identify physical-causal or other systematic principles underlying events.
Superior systemizing depends on exactness in information processing. This exactness is seen in autistic people’s pedantic speech ,the inclusion of more details than necessary in their answers, and their very detailed memory., However if the exactness mechanism is too highly tuned, it is not possible to answer questions to which an exact answer is unavailable. It also takes longer to select an answer from many possible ones. It therefore affects one’s empathizing skills, as in this domain, answers are never exact.作者: niuniuma 时间: 2010-1-26 03:20 标题: re:http://www.ied.edu.h... http://www.ied.edu.hk/autism/Executive%20Functioning.htm
執行困難理論 (Executive Dysfunction)
什麼是「執行困難」？(Hughes, Russell, & Robins, 1994)
最簡單來說，是不能從目前的處境中抽離，也不能跟隨個人的思考模式來行動。在想法解讀 (Theory of Mind) 的錯誤想法 (false belief) 測試中，它指知覺上不能擺脫物件在當眼位置的影響，因而選擇了一個最明顯但也是錯的答案。
學者 (Fein, D. et.al. Executive Functioning in High-functioning Children with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry Vol.42, Bo.2, pp.261-270, 2001) 對「執行困難」理論的研究結果：
Baron-Cohen, S. (draft 4th May 2001). The exact mind: Empathising and systemizing in autism spectrum conditions? To appear in Goswami, U, (ed) Handbook of Cognitive Development. Blackwell:Oxford (in press)
以下採自Fein, D. et.al.(2001) Executive Functioning in High-functioning Children with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry Vol.42, Bo.2, pp.261-270, 2001
Autistic disorder and other pervasive developmental disorders are generally associated with weaknesses on tasks involving cognitive flexibility, verbal reasoning, complex or verbal memory, and complex language. It has been proposed, accordingly, that cognitive deficits, specifically executive functioning deficits, are a primary cause of autistic behavior (Ozonoff, Pennington, & Rogers, 1991; Pennington et al., 1997: Russell, 1997)
What is Executive Functioning (EF) or Executive Dysfunction?
Although there is no consensus about the components of executive functioning, it is thought to include such processes as
- forming abstract concepts,
- having a flexible sequenced plan of action,
- focusing and sustaining attention and mental effort,
- rapidly retrieving relevant information
- being able to self-monitor and self-correct as a task is performed
- being able to inhibit impulsive responses
Executive functioning can also be described as the ability to disengage from the current situation and guide behavior by referring to mental models (Hughes, Russell, & Robins, 1994)
In this task the child simply had to point to one of two boxes, into which he/she alone could see via a small window. On each trial a sweet was placed in one of the boxes, and if the child indicated the empty box(versus the second, baited box), he won the sweet. In the competitor version, an ignorant second player searched in the indicated box, and kept any sweets thus found – so that the child was effectively rewarded for “deceiving” the competitor.
It was found that autistic subjects did badly at the “windows task’ with or without a competitor.
(以上見於Happ F. (1994). Autism. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press P.54)
The most Robust Test in EF – Wisconsin card Sorting Test (WCST) and what is it?
This test involves the ability to change sorting categories flexibly in response to verbal feedback. Subjects are shown 4 cards that vary on three dimensions (color, form, and number). They are then told that they must sort a stack of 128 cards but are not told how to sort them. They must respond to examiner feedback (they are told correct or incorrect after each trial). After a subject sorts 10 cards correctly, the sorting principle changes (from color to form to number). Several scores are calculated during this test. Total categories indicates the total number of complete sorting categories achieved (the maximum is 6). Total number correct indicates how many correct cards were sorted. Number of perseverative errors indicates how many times the subject sorted to a previously reinforced category, thus ignoring the negative feedback.
(Heaton, Chelune, Talley, Kay, & Curtis, 1993)
Temple Grandin’s explanation of ‘Perseveration’ (1995):
People with autism may be using a different selective attention mechanism than normal people (Ciesielski, Courchesne, & Elmasian, 1990) Their research has shown that people with autism take much longer to shift between visual and auditory stimuli. Attention shifting may explain some socially inappropriate behavior. Donna Williams explained that it is difficult to look for social rules in her memory at the moment an event is occurring. In some cases, perseveration may be an extreme dysfunction of attention shifting.
Findings of Fein’s paper:
1. Only certain executive functions are affected in autism, most notably perseveration (知道錯但繼續錯下去). Perseveration occurs most often on tasks of greater difficulty. Individuals with autism tend to make perseverative errors and have difficulty changing cognitive set on challenging tasks.
2. There are deficits on planning tasks.
It is unclear whether the relationship between EF and perseverative behavior is causal or whether perserveration is a reflection of how autism was defined in the first place.
Relationship between Executive Dysfunction and Frontal Lesion
(以下見於Ozonoff, S. (1995) Executive Functions in Autism. Learning and Cognition in Autism. New York: Plenum Press)
腦前額葉受傷病人的表現：
The deficits incurred have been richly described by Luria (1966) and more recently, by Duncan (1986) and Stuss and Benson (1986); they include
l Repetitive, aimless movements or speech
l Difficulty inhibiting familiar or obvious responses
l Inappropriate repetition of previous thoughts or actions
l Diminished capacity for planning
Stuss (1987,cited in Mateer 7 Williams, 1991) described several additional information-processing deficits :
l A tendency to focus on one aspect of information
l Difficulty relating or integrating isolated details
l Problems managing simultaneous or multiple sources of information
l Impaired ability to act on or apply knowledge in a meaningful manner
自閉症人士相似的行為：
l rigid and inflexible behavior
l becoming distressed over trivial changes in the environment
l insistence on following routines in precise detail
l focusing on one narrow interest or repetitively engaging in one stereotyped behavior
l impulsiveness, having trouble delaying or inhibiting responses
l having trouble applying or using their large store of knowledge
l focusing on details and having difficulty in seeing the big picture
腦前額葉包括的能力：
l the ability to form a mental representation (e.g. a plan, schema or response set) that must be held on-line to successfully complete the task and flexibility in shifting response set when a strategy is no longer correct
l regulation of social behavior, emotional reactions (Stuss & Benson, 1986) and social discourse (Dennis, 1991)
由於後者，腦前額葉受傷因而可解釋自閉症社交方面的障礙。
以腦前額葉受傷解釋自閉症的局限：
1.Why do children with early frontal lesions not appear autistic?
Prefrontal dysfunction may be a necessary, but not a sufficient, criterion for the development of autism; perhaps other cognitive deficits, or neurological dysfunction, must also be present to produce the full-blown syndrome.
2. There are some abilities that a deficit in using mental representations to guide behaviors would predict to be impaired are in actual circumstances not impaired, e.g. object permanence (Morgan, Cutrer, Coplin, & Rodrigue, 1989); false photograph tasks (Leslie & thaiss, 1992) Is it because they rely on external clues or these tasks are not highly abstract or novel? Thus, a number of factors may be important in determining whether individuals with autism can use internal models, rather than external context, to guide behavior.
3. frontal lobe cognitive dysfunction is not specific to autism, also seen in ADHD, conduct disorder etc. The question is : how executive function deficits might be related to autism in a way that differentiates it from other disorders.
- Bishop (1993) : It is insufficient to account for documented deficits in social cognition, because such deficits are not shown by other clinical groups with impaired executive system functions, and because autistic children fail to show comparable difficulty when second-order representations do not involve social material.
What does Simon Baron-Cohen say about EF?
Baron-Cohen, S. (draft 4th May 2001). The exact mind: Empathising and systemizing in autism spectrum conditions? To appear in Goswami, U, (ed) Handbook of Cognitive Development. Blackwell:Oxford (in press)
To date, the only cognitive account to attempt to explain “repetitive behavior”, a strong desire for routines, and a “need for sameness” is the executive dysfunction theory (Ozonoff, Rogers, Farnham & Pennington, 1994; Pennington et al., 1997: Russell, 1997b)
While ‘stereotypies’ are likely to be due to executive deficits, the fact that it is possible for people with Asperger Syndrome to exist who have no demonstrable executive dysfunction whilst still have deficits in empathizing and talents in systemizing suggests that executive dysfunction cannot be a core feature of autism spectrum conditions.
The executive account has also traditionally ignored the content of “repetitive behavior”. The empathizing-systemising theory in contrast draws attention to the fact that much repetitive behavior involves the child’s ‘obsessional’ or strong interests with mechanical systems or other systems that can be understood in terms of rules and regularities. This may reflect the child’s intact or even superior development of their folk physics.作者: niuniuma 时间: 2010-1-29 12:59 标题: re:“8.重複性行為重複是輸入和輸出... “8.重複性行為
另外，澄清一下michelle garcia winner不是提出这俩个理论的。她创立了一个方法叫social thinking, 也就是旺旺老师的链接上的。可惜，她的书（thinking about you， thinking about me），我才看了一页，就被这两个理论先打了岔。本来想贴一段英文书的段落，怕侵权，又没多少人喜欢看洋文。