Foundation For Autism Research and Remeditation

Grants & Research

Recent Grants Awarded by FARR

The Foundation for Autism Research and Remediation is proud to announce the award of over $100,000 over the next three years to Dr. Jessica Meyer and Professor Peter Hobson of the Tavistock Clinic and Institute of Child Health, University College, London. To learn more about the Institute of Child Health go to http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/ich/academicunits/Behavioural_and_brain_sciences/Homepage
To learn more about the Tavistock Clinic, go to http://www.tavi-port.org/NEWindex.htm .

The aims of the project are to assess the relationships between social and cognitive development in children with autism. The purpose of the study is to determine how changes in the children’s patterns of social relatedness over a two-year period are accompanied by changes in specific aspects of their cognitive functioning.

This study is important because it will determine whether children who show changes in social relatedness also show changes in their cognitive functioning (e.g. higher IQ scores, cognitive flexibility).

Title of project

Change in autism: Social and cognitive development in children who are engaged in treatment.

Applicants

Dr Jessica Meyer and Professor Peter Hobson
Tavistock Clinic and Institute of Child Health, University College, London.

Aims

The aims of the project are to assess the relations between social and cognitive development in children with autism. The purpose is to explore how changes in the children’s patterns of relatedness towards other persons are accompanied by changes in specific aspects of cognitive functioning during the course of a treatment program designed to target these domains.

There will be two separate studies, addressing these issues in ways that are appropriate to two distinct age groups of children, one group aged between four and six years, and the other between eight and 14 years. This approach will allow us to adopt two different but complementary methodologies to examine a pivotal aspect of development in children with autism: the degree to which their (relative) inflexibility in thinking and dearth of creative symbolic play has an intimate connection with their (relative) limitations in engaging with other people’s attitudes to a shared world, and the degree to which these may be amenable to change.

It is important that this does not represent an outcome study, in the sense of comparing treatment approaches. Rather, it builds upon the evidence that RDI is effective in fostering interpersonal engagement, to examine whether changes in social relatedness correspond with changes in cognitive functioning. Although it is not possible to establish which aspects of functioning are developmentally dependent on which others from a design of this kind, especially as treatment focuses on both aspects of the disorder, the results promise to illuminate the broader implications of intervention focused upon interpersonal engagement and communication.

A further aim of the project is to support and inspire the early development of the FARR research enterprise. The mission of this endeavour is to conduct research that is clinically meaningful and scientifically subtle and robust, so that clinical interventions can be informed by, and contribute vital input to, discoveries about the nature of autism and the potential effects of intervention.

Hypothesis and predictions

The hypothesis underlying the study is that there is an intimate relation between a child’s ability to ‘identify with’ other people – that is, to perceive and respond to other people’s attitudes to a shared world, in such a way that they can accommodate to and adopt new perspectives through others – and the child’s ability to think flexibly. In our view, this capacity is critical for the child’s ability to a) engage in joint attention; b) participate in shared meaning; and c) adopt a symbol-creating attitude or stance.

The methods will include novel measures of communicative flexibility and understanding – for instance, testing how far the children adjust their communication in accordance with a conversational partner, or grasp alternative meanings when they see someone pointing – alongside tests of co-constructed meanings in play, and standardized cognitive measures.

We predict that, independent of other aspects of cognitive functioning, the interdependency of social and cognitive functioning will be apparent not only when children are first assessed, but also as they show (or do not show) change in the course of treatment. We predict that individual differences in changes in interpersonal relatedness over time will correspond with individual differences in changes in cognitive flexibility and the ability to abstract.

Therefore we anticipate that improvements in scores for identifying with someone else will be associated with improvements not only in joint attention, but also in play and in flexible, abstract cognitive functioning. Moreover, we shall test a further prediction about the process of perspective-shifting, namely that self-initiation of new meanings and spontaneous adoption of another person’s meanings in play will be more likely to occur within rather than outside episodes of joint attention. The results will provide important insights into aspects of thinking that are critically dependent on social engagement, and elucidate the implications of difficulties in this domain among person with autism.

There is one additional feature of this work that deserves mention. Too often, research studies in autism have only tenuous links with issues of practical relevance for improving the quality of life of affected individuals and their caregivers. In the present case, there are very substantial real-life implications. Suppose it turns out that fostering the interpersonal engagement of individuals with autism also influences their ability to think flexibly and to become more sensitive to people's communication. One implication is that we will be better placed to seize opportunities to expand these individuals' ways of thinking about the non-personal as well as personal world, and to foster their ability to share and co-ordinate their experiences with others.

Home | Contact Us | Search | Community Links