1994 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Neuropsychological and Information scientific Research on Cognitive Disturbance of Autistic Children
| Project/Area Number |
05610054
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Research Field |
実験系心理学
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| Research Institution | Akita University |
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Principal Investigator |
YAGUCHI Kiyoshi Akita University School of Education Associate Professor, 教育学部, 助教授 (50200481)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
SHINODA Nobuo Akita University School of Education Associate Professor, 教育学部, 助教授 (80241652)
TOJO Yosikuni The National Institute of Special Education, Section of Education for the Autist, 分室, 主任研究官 (00132720)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1993 – 1994
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| Keywords | Autism / Cognitive Disturbance / Neuropsychology / Information Processing / Laterality / Relationship Abstraction / Fuzzy Concept |
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| Research Abstract |
We investigated the cognitive trait of autistic children by means of neuropsychological analysis. We assumed that they have difficulty in comparing and evaluating incoming information to memory or other incoming information because of an incomplete connection between emotional-reward system (brainstem to limbic system) and cognitive-language system (neocortex), so that they have cognitive and social behavior disturbances. Unfortunately, we cannot report on the results concerning their emotional aspects because of time restrictions.
Our main results are as follows :
(1) According to the laterality of EEG alpha blocking during a word and visual patternconstruction task performed by autistic children and their performance level, theirright hemisphere is over activated but dose not display a high functional level.
(2) Event related desynchronization (ERD : alpha blocking) is a useful measure foranalyzing information processing in the brain during thinking.
(3) The cognitive processing analysis system which we constructed can analyze thecognitive traits of a wide range of developmental disorders including autism.
(4) An autistic child has a functional disturbance concerning "abstract relationsamong many things" because of difficulties with both simultaneous and sequentialsynthesis, not just a dysfunction with one kind of synthesis.
(5) According to the result of our inference task, autistic children display a difficulty in dealing with fuzzy concepts. They use iconic cues more effectively than word cues. Moreover, some autistic children are distracted by word cues. This suggests that they have difficulty in handling seqential information processing.
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