Brain representations of social thoughts predict autism

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The pronoun reversal was initially reported by Kanner in his paper on the original 11 autistic children that he studied. Some autistic children do have this kind of pronoun usage, but most outgrow it by late childhood. I sometimes automatically say or type you when I mean I in communications, which is why I check my emails for pronoun reversals, because reversing you vs. I is super confusing for the reader, while he vs. she is not usually a big deal.

Generally, scientific research in autism involves mostly participants with high-functioning autism with IQ > 70 in children and average or above in adults. This is because researchers wish to study autism without the conflating effects of intellectual disability. Also, many tasks are easily done by HFA, but not LFA. There are some studies with only LFA participants. In each study, the researchers report the demographics of the participants, including age range, IQ range, specific autism spectrum diagnoses, gender, etc.

There are at least a couple of hospitals doing this type of research with children in my city right now. It is very hard here to get the proper testing to diagnose ASD in children (testing that the DOE and state will recognize as valid diagnostic tools) without paying at least $4000.00 out of pocket. So, parents wishing that their children be tested (in order to receive services and proper educational support) will often sign up. They screen potential ASD participants by doing an extensive parent phone interview to see if their child seems likely to receive an ASD diagnosis. Then, they do a bunch of tests including an IQ test, ADOS, and at least a few others along with a 4-5 hour parent interview. They pay the participants and supply a full neuro psych report including a diagnosis (if there is one).

I am sincere in the concerns I have about the unqualified acceptance of brain imaging claims.

http://newmr.org/blog/most-published-re ... ioannidis/

This professor - who researches research did a meta analysis, working backwards from the studies to determine how many positive findings could plausibly be expected in relation to MRI research on brain imaging.

The answer: even being generous, there were twice as many positive findings reported as could realistically be expected from the amount of data reported on.

There could be a lot of reasons for this. Publication bias toward positive findings is one - and that creates a false impression of the infallibility of this technique in the public mind. Negative papers finding no such effect don't get reported - they aren't "sexy" in media jargon.

Effect is not the same thing as cause. Here effect is presented as cause, which is problematic. We are having another discussion on research issues in Random - "The Trouble with Research Shows" is the thread title.

A cough is also a reliable indictor of pneumonia, but there's much more to it than that.

Asking the same question to two groups and seeing if they differ in what they spontaneously do is the purpose of the task.
If NTs think about themselves hugging their friends or family, while autistics think of hugging in other ways, then those differences might show up as differences in fmri activation patterns.

The point of research is to advance the understanding of a topic a little bit at a time, so any specific result should not be taken as close to the truth until there are multiple lines of evidence from different behavioral tasks, different brain studies, studies using fMRI vs. EEG vs. TMS, that indicate similar conclusions.