PSYC 438 - Final Exam Questions and
Complete Solutions
SEC ✅Social-Emotional-Communicative Challenges
SEC A: Impaired dyadic social interaction (1. Social orienting) ✅TD neonates'
preferential attention to social stimuli (faces, voices, movements of the mouth, eyes, or
hands) as opposed to non social-stimuli
SEC A: Impaired dyadic social interaction (2. Eye salience and gaze following) ✅other
people's eyes capture and hold the attention of TD neonates, and they can discriminate
whether a person's eyes are directed toward them or averted (the infant's eyes tend to
move in the direction of whatever the other person is looking at (gaze following -->
precursor to joint attention))
SEC A: Impaired dyadic social interaction (3. Social Learning) ✅TD neonates
recognize their mother's voice, having heard it in utero. By the 3rd week of life, TD
infants recognize the faces of primary caregivers and spend more time looking at them
than at unfamiliar faces. --> these indicate that certain perceptual and memory/learning
capacities are present at/or even before birth
SEC A: Impaired dyadic social interaction (4. Imitation) ✅The propensity to imitate
others' facial postures (i.e. tongue protrusion) occurs in TD neonates. They may also
spontaneously imitate hand movements. By the end of the third month TD infants
imitate others' facial expressions of emotion.
SEC A: Impaired dyadic social interaction (5. Social motivation) ✅intrinsic reward-
value of social stimuli (indicated by TD neonates' spontaneous initiation of eye contact
and expressions of pleasure (social smiling, vocalisation) during social engagement
within the first three months of life.
SEC A: Impaired dyadic social interaction (6. Synchronisation) ✅of vocalisations and
movements in dyadic interactions observable in TD infants by 3 months of age.
Indicates existence of capacities for fine-grained timing in both the perception and
production of movements and sounds.
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (1. Brain bases) ✅Grey and white matter
overgrowth and reduced pruning (First 18 months)
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 1: Perhaps one or other of the
processes is 'primary' and contributes to all other listed forms of impaired dyadic
,interaction) --> 1. ✅Social Orienting Deficit: primary, resulting in a cascade of effects
underlying the SEC impairments in ASD
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 1: Perhaps one or other of the
processes is 'primary' and contributes to all other listed forms of impaired dyadic
interaction) --> 2. ✅Eye salience and gaze following --> however children who are
blind from birth are not generally/persistently autistic despite showing some autistic like
behaviours in childhood
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 1: Perhaps one or other of the
processes is 'primary' and contributes to all other listed forms of impaired dyadic
interaction) --> 3. ✅Impaired social learning (persistent face and voice recognition
problems) --> however children who are both deaf and blind from birth are not
invariantly/persistently autistic despite showing some autistic like behaviours in
childhood
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 1: Perhaps one or other of the
processes is 'primary' and contributes to all other listed forms of impaired dyadic
interaction) --> 4. ✅Impaired imitation --> however it is selective not pervasive
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 1: Perhaps one or other of the
processes is 'primary' and contributes to all other listed forms of impaired dyadic
interaction) --> 5. ✅Impaired social motivation (impaired reward system theory) -->
ONE OF THE BIGGER FACTORS: failure to experience reward from social interactions
would gradually undermine the innate - and initially intact - tendencies to look at faces,
make eye contact, respond to faces and voices of familiar carers, and imitate
movements and facial expressions of others --> hypothesis consistent with the fact that
dyadic interaction is initially unimpaired and then declines.
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 1: Perhaps one or other of the
processes is 'primary' and contributes to all other listed forms of impaired dyadic
interaction) --> 6. ✅Impaired timing and sequencing theory --> problem with
sequencing is about the lack of sense of time and its continuity; The problems with time
lie in comprehending the passage of time and linking it with ongoing activities --> Timing
essential for reciprocal social interaction, thus failure to co-ordinate and synchronize
social interactions during the first year of life undermines those facets of dyadic
operating that operated at first. --> STRONG HYPOTHESIS: maps directly to brain
basis (lack of synaptic pruning, hence onset of autistic behaviour at ~14 months -->
resulting overgrowth of brain tissue disrupts neural connectivity underlying coordinated
oscillatory timing mechanisms or brain waves). FINE-GRAINED TIMING (time parsing)
involved in active behaviour, coordination and integration of neural activity within the
brain
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 2: Impaired triadic (three-way)
interaction) ✅Triadic interaction (You, me, X) is dependent on: (a) understanding in
,one's own mind the representation of X in another person mind; (b) awareness of
sharing the experience of X --> in its earliest forms X: something out there both of us
can see, hear or feel. Impairment, thus explained by impairment in the ability to
mentalise (ability to form representations of other people's and one's own mental states;
also ability to lie, people with ASD "can't lie", HF can, high variability --> some get
physically nauseous when they lie; decide not to lie because lying causes: paying
attention to how other will react, the snowball effect, too much effort, do. not understand
why people lie to spare others' feelings)
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 3: Impaired ToM) ✅impairment in
the ability to mentalise (ability to form representations of other people's and one's own
mental states; also ability to lie, people with ASD "can't lie", HF can, high variability;
failure in solving false belief task: resulting from impaired metarepresentation (ability to
form a representation of a representation --> making it possible to 'think about thinking';
usually comes at age 4) --> partly correct but cannot explain precursors to impaired
ToM (i.e. impaired triadic interaction)
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 3: Impaired ToM) cont. ✅Impaired
mentalizing explains failure in false belief task and triadic interaction impairment, also
very early dyadic interaction
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 3: Impaired ToM) 'Shared Attention
Mechanism (SAM) and Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM)' ✅First SAM and then
ToMM --> Failure of one or both of these modular abilities, to come on-stream at the
usual ages, impair triadic interaction and ToM respectively. --> However, later emphasis
placed on early-manifesting problems of dyadic interaction (gaze following, ability to
infer another person's mental state from 'reading the mind in the eyes) --> THUS,
certain forms of dyadic interaction impaired in infants who will develop ASD cause
impaired mentalising, impaired triadic relating and ToM
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 3: Impaired ToM) 'Intersubjective
relatedness' ✅understanding that we care or not about similar things
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 3: Impaired ToM) 'affective
agnosia/emotional blindness/alexithymia' ✅diminish young infant's desire for social
interaction because no shared pleasure in it, only self-centred pleasure (i.e. from
sensations provided by being rocked or tickled); lack of co-experiences of emotion,
impair the ability that other people experience the same emotions; shared attention (i.e.
Daddy wants and I want the cake --> TD develop a little later, impaired in ASD -->
THUS, protodeclarative communication (bringing and showing or pointing at something
interesting) will not occur; no idea of possibility of sharing mental states and emotions) -
-> PRIMACY THEORY: I don't understand myself, I won't understand others --> will only
understand extreme emotions
, SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 3: Impaired ToM) 'Hypothesized:
ToM = missing in ASD' ✅Influences the reason why they won't interact with other
people
ASD needs a "map" (analogy) --> even to empathize
Because they don't have that specificity
GPS (ASD will know map after taking route 1x)
+++stress if taking other route
Some 2-4yrs old (nonverbal) but able to scroll & browse
SEC challenges: Causes for impairments (2. Theory 3: Impaired ToM) "Reasons for not
passing 'false belief task' " ✅Central coherence (ability to perceive wholes instead of
parts); certain level of language ability; general intelligence; executive functions
Explaining impaired emotion processing: impairment in integration ✅Ben Shalom:
people with ASD experience the physiological components of emotion but fail to
associate this experience with whatever stimulated the emotion (sensation not
associated with affect) --> i.e. did I like it when I went on the bouncy castle?; get cold
sweat and other phisyological correlates of fear when seeing a snake but not
connecting it to the snake; DYSYNCHRONIZATION of senses (sound, visual) and
panics/fear → implicit systems (because you can block all the sensation pathways
(present sensation micro sec → no not conscious) and still experience fear)
i.e. Hearing the teacher screaming @ another student, but you still intially react as if it
was directed at you
But always reacting like that in diff situation and not understand why bc of
dysynchronisation
Explaining impaired emotion processing: impairment in integration (continued) ✅Fits
well with contagious empathy theory--> spared in ASD, while cognitive, which involves
mentalising, is impaired; also fits well with emotional blindness (Kanner)
Explaining impaired emotion processing: impairment in integration --> Baron Cohen
'impaired empathising system theory' ✅Inability to appreciate another's emotions
results from impaired mentalizing --> Continuum:
Empathizing syst:
More emotional
<<girls
Systemising:
More categorizing, rational
<<males
Explaining impaired communication ✅1. Impaired language; 2. Impaired
comprehension and use of nonverbal signals; 3. Impaired comprehension of facial
expressions of emotions;
