Narrative Impairments in Autistic Children

Dermatoglyphic comparisons were made among 32 autistic children aged from 4-10 to 18-11; sex-, age-, and IQ-matched retarded children; and sex- and age-matched normal children. Significant differences were found between the autistic and normal children for distribution of dermal patterns and ridge line disruption, but no significant differences were found for the total mean ridge counts or mean ridge count rankings. Apart from the right hand of the autistic children, there were no unusual scores for digital dispersion ratios. Autistic and retarded children differed only in their distribution of dermal patterns, with the autistic children apparently intermediate between retarded and normal groups. These results indicate that conclusions of unique congenital disturbance in the etiology of autism inferred from different dermatoglyphics may be premature, and that dermatoglyphics may be ineffective in delineating autistic children from other atypical populations.

Social initiations made by autistic and verbal-matched retarded children were recorded in two naturalistic situations. Frequencies of initiation to adults did not differ between groups, but the retarded children initiated much more frequently to peers. Most interactions for both groups were positive, but the autistic children engaged in more ritualized, and the retarded children more playful, initiations. The autistic children monitored the social environment more when forced into proximity with peers, whereas the retarded children initiated more in the unstructured situation. Autistic initiation to peers was unrelated to severity of autism, but was related to cognitive skills, including vocabulary and comprehension of affect, whereas retarded children's initiations were unrelated to cognitive level. Results are discussed in terms of the differences between adults and children as social stimuli, prerequisite skills for initiation to peers, and the relationship between social cognition and social behavior. It is suggested that autistic and retarded children differ in the quantity of their initiations to peers, and the quality of their initiations to adults, and that initiations to peers may be a particularly useful index of social development in autistic children. Results confirm the need of autistic children for highly structured social environments, and suggest an important role for the remediation of specific cognitive skills such as comprehension of others' affects.

This study involved observations of children's behaviors in interactive situations with both familiar and unfamiliar partners. The greatest differences between the autistic and nonautistic children were in an unstructured situation where caregivers did not initiate interactions. In this situation, autistic children rarely looked to the partner or initiated social bids to the partner. They also were less focused on the toys available for play compared to nonautistic children. However, the autistic children were similar in their interactive responses to the partner in an adult-initiated social situation. Individual differences confirmed that more able autistic children in terms of cognitive and language abilities also engaged in greater social and communicative behavior with the partner. These findings suggest that the ways in which social deficits are manifested by autistic children are variable with respect to the context in which they are measured.

This article focuses on the impact of intentionality on goal directed locomotion in healthy and autistic children. Closely linked with emotions and motivation, it is directly connected with movement planning. Is planning only preserved when the goal of the action appears motivating for healthy and autistic children? Is movement programming similar for autistic and healthy children, and does it vary according to the emotional valence of the object? Moving in a straight line, twenty autistic and healthy children had to retrieve a positive or aversive emotional valence object. The results suggest planning and programming are preserved in an emotionally positive situation. However, in an aversive situation, autistic children appear to have a deficit in terms of planning and sometimes programming.

Social robots have the potential to support autistic school children with their wellbeing. This research reveals how a co-design approach with autistic children and their teachers was undertaken. Focus groups with autistic children and teachers collaboratively identified user requirements for the social robot and robot behaviours within the school ecosystem in order to improve student wellbeing. The results reveal the importance of including autistic children in the co-design process to ensure their voices are heard and also that the role of the robot is appropriate and targeted to the users’ needs and requirements. Autistic children and their teachers report multiple potential benefits for social robots supporting emotional wellbeing in the school. Autistic children were supportive of the introduction of a social robot in their school, mostly expressing positive attitudes towards the robot. The research is significant in revealing how a user-centred co-design approach involving autistic children and social robots may support emotional wellbeing.

Autistic children experience higher levels of anxiety than their peers. Making appropriate diagnoses of anxiety disorders and providing effective treatment for these children is particularly difficult. Inconsistent evidence suggests that levels of anxiety in autistic children are related to intellectual functioning. We provide the first meta-analysis of this evidence. A systematic search identified 49 papers for review. These papers included measures of anxiety and intelligence quotient in 18,430 autistic children. Studies employing correlations showed evidence of a significant relationship between intelligence quotient and anxiety in autistic children: children with higher intelligence quotient scored higher on measures of anxiety. Studies directly comparing groups of autistic children with and without intellectual disability also supported this conclusion. Most studies employing other designs also supported this finding. Employing a quality assessment framework identified common threats to validity. Many studies used measures of anxiety that were not validated across the samples they measure. This was most notable for those autistic children with an intellectual disability. It is vital that future research determines whether the identified relationship between intelligence quotient and anxiety reflects something important in the mechanism for anxiety in autistic children, or quantifies the lack of sensitivity of our measures of anxiety across different groups.Lay abstractAutistic children often experience higher levels of anxiety than their peers. It can be difficult to diagnose and treat anxiety disorders in autistic children, in part because of the high degree of variability in their underlying abilities and presentations. Some evidence suggests that autistic children with higher intelligence (as measured by intelligence quotient) experience higher levels of anxiety than autistic children with lower intelligence. However, the evidence is inconsistent, with other papers not finding a difference or finding higher levels of anxiety in autistic children with lower intelligence. In this article, we review existing literature to see whether autistic children with higher intelligence quotients have higher anxiety than autistic children with lower intelligence quotients. A systematic search of the literature was conducted which identified 49 papers on the topic. The methods of all the papers were reviewed using an objective quality assessment framework. When combining the data statistically, there was evidence that autistic children with higher intelligence quotients are more anxious than autistic children with lower intelligence quotients. The quality review raised common weaknesses across studies. Most importantly, few studies used measures of anxiety that have been shown to be valid for children with very low intelligence quotients. Similarly, many studies used measures of anxiety that have not been shown to be valid for autistic children. These factors are important because autistic children and those with low intelligence quotient may experience or understand anxiety differently. Future research should use fully validated measures to test whether high intelligence quotient is associated with high levels of anxiety in autistic children.

Autistic children rarely engage in eye contact, and whilst observation suggests this is due to a specific avoidance of eye contact, some experimental studies have challenged this. In this study the effects on autistic and normal children of an adult looking at them with both eyes, with one eye covered, or apparently not looking at them (both eyes covered) were investigated. As expected, autistic children looked more at the adult with his eyes covered, and also engaged in less flight behaviour. They looked less when two eyes were exposed than one, confirming the potency of the two-eye pattern in provoking gaze aversion. Normal children engaged in much more eye contact than the autistic children, with fewer flight behaviours and stereotypies, supporting the hypothesis that autistic children are predominatly flight motivated. Other, sometimes conflicting, results of previous studies are discussed. Teachers and nurses are recommened not to make efforts to engage autistic children even in friendly eye contact as this provokes more flight behaviour.

Word learning depends on attention – children must focus on the right things at the right times. However, autistic children often display restricted interests, limiting their intake of stimuli during word learning. This study investigates how category interests influence word learning in autism and neurotypical development. Autistic and neurotypical children matched on receptive vocabulary used a touch-screen computer to learn novel words associated with animals (high-interest stimuli) and objects (neutral-interest stimuli) via fast mapping. Response accuracy and speed were examined at referent selection, 5-minute retention, and 24-hour retention. Both groups identified meanings of novel words associated with unfamiliar animals and objects via mutual exclusivity with comparable accuracy. After 5 minutes, autistic children retained animal names with greater accuracy than neurotypical children. Autistic children showed a greater increase in their accuracy between 5-minute and 24-hour retention and outperformed neurotypical children across conditions after a night’s sleep. Across groups, 24-hour retention was predicted by number of target word repetitions heard at referent selection, indicating a relationship between fast mapping input and retention. However, autistic children were slower to respond correctly, particularly in the animal condition. For autistic children, superior word learning associated with high-interest stimuli was relatively short-term, as sleep appeared to consolidate their memory representations for neutral-interest stimuli. Although these results demonstrate that fundamental word learning mechanisms are not atypical in autism, slower response times may signal a speed-accuracy trade-off that could have implications for naturalistic language acquisition. Our findings also indicate favourable environmental conditions to scaffold word learning.

Although autism inclusion and acceptance has increased in recent years, autistic people continue to face stigmatization, exclusion, and victimization. Based on brief 10-second videos, non-autistic adults rate autistic adults less favourably than they rate non-autistic adults in terms of traits and behavioural intentions. In the current study, we extended this paradigm to investigate the first impressions of autistic and non-autistic children by non-autistic adult raters and examined the relationship between the rater's own characteristics and bias against autistic children. Segments of video recorded interviews from 15 autistic and 15 non-autistic children were shown to 346 undergraduate students in audio with video, audio only, video only, transcript, or still image conditions. Participants rated each child on a series of traits and behavioural intentions toward the child, and then completed a series of questionnaires measuring their own social competence, autistic traits, quantity and quality of past experiences with autistic people, and explicit autism stigma. Overall, autistic children were rated more negatively than non-autistic children, particularly in conditions containing audio. Raters with higher social competence and explicit autism stigma rated autistic children more negatively, whereas raters with more autistic traits and more positive past experiences with autistic people rated autistic children more positively. These rapid negative judgments may contribute to the social exclusion experienced by autistic children. The findings indicate that certain personal characteristics may be related to more stigmatised views of autism and decreased willingness to interact with the autistic person. The implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the social inclusion and well-being of autistic people.

Executive function predicts school readiness in autistic and typical preschool children

Autistic children are typically late to develop their expressive vocabulary, but little is known about their early word learning process. This study compared three network growth models on their ability to account for the trajectories of expressive vocabulary acquisition in autistic and non-autistic children. We studied expressive vocabularies using item-level data from a child vocabulary checklist (n = 721 records from young autistic children; n = 2,166 records from non-autistic toddlers). We estimated vocabulary growth trajectories for autistic and non-autistic children and assessed the goodness of fit of three models of vocabulary growth, with varying sensitivity to the structure of the environment and the learner's existing vocabulary knowledge. To do so, we first computed word-level acquisition norms that indicate the vocabulary size at which individual words tend to be learned by each group. Then we evaluated how well network growth models, based on natural language co-occurrence structure and word associations, accounted for variance in the autistic and non-autistic acquisition norms. Our word-level vocabulary size of acquisition norms closely aligned with age of acquisition data, indicating their utility when age of acquisition norms cannot be derived for neurodivergent populations. Furthermore, we extended key observations and demonstrated that the growth models explained similar amounts of variance in each group. Both groups are biased to learn words that have many connections to words that have been previously learned; however, even after accounting for this learning influence, autistic and non-autistic vocabulary growth trajectories receive an added boost in learning when words are connected to many other words in the learning environment, indicating a similar learning profile. Both groups preferentially acquire new words by leveraging the semantic structure in the learning environment, indicating an overlap in theoretical accounts of vocabulary growth.

Morality can help guide behavior and facilitate relationships. Although moral judgments by autistic people are similar to neurotypical individuals, many researchers argue that subtle differences signify deficits in autistic individuals. Moral foundation theory describes moral judgments in terms of differences rather than deficits. The current research, aimed at assessing autistic individuals’ moral inclinations using Haidt’s framework, was co-designed with autistic community members. Our aim was to describe autistic moral thinking from a strengths-based perspective while acknowledging differences that may pose interpersonal challenges among autistic youth. We assessed 25 autistic and 23 neurotypical children’s moral judgments using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire for Kids. We used semi-structured interviews and qualitative analysis with a subset of participants to describe children’s moral reasoning. Analyses suggested that autistic and neurotypical children make similar judgments about moral transgressions across all five moral foundations. General linear mixed modeling showed that the greatest predictor of recommending punishment was how bad children deemed moral transgressions to be. We also found a trend that autistic children were more likely to recommend punishment for harmless norms violations than were neurotypical children. Future research could use longitudinal methods to understand the development of moral judgments among autistic and neurotypical children.

Slower looking to faces is a common behavioral feature of autism central to sociocognitve development. However, the underlying mechanism explaining this phenomenon remains unclear. We investigated whether deprioritization of social information or prolonged prioritization of nonsocial information better accounted for slower latency to look at faces in a large sample of autistic (n = 269) and neurotypical (NT; n = 118) children. Participants completed an eye tracking (ET) assay in which they viewed arrays of social and nonsocial stimuli. To determine why autistic children were slower to look at faces, we computed two ET metrics that reflected either deprioritization of social information or prolonged prioritization of nonsocial information. Deprioritization of social information was operationalized by face look number (FLN), which was defined as the numerical look sequence position of the first face look. Prolonged prioritization of nonsocial information was operationalized by time per object prior, which was defined as the average looking time per nonsocial object prior to the first face look. We found that autistic children were slower to look at faces compared to NT children and had higher FLN but not time per object prior compared to NT children. FLN was associated with measures of the autism phenotype. In summary, this work suggests deprioritization of social information better explains slower latency to look at faces in autistic children than prolonged prioritization of nonsocial information, with the reduced prioritization of faces contributing to difficulties in dynamic social interaction commonly observed in autism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

BackgroundAlthough there is increasing interest in the capabilities of children with autism at different stages of the criminal justice process, there is little research into how well this group perform when asked to identify perpetrators from identification lineups. This is despite theoretical and empirical literature suggesting that autistic children experience face recognition memory difficulties. MethodAs part of a broader study into eyewitness memory skills, 50 children with autism and 162 children with typical development (TD) (all with IQs > 69) watched a mock crime event (either live or on a video) involving two male perpetrators. One week later, their eyewitness identification skills were compared, with children asked to identify the perpetrators from two ecologically valid video lineups. The children were also assessed on a standardised face memory task. ResultsWhen asked to identify perpetrators in the video lineups, in many respects the autistic children performed at an equivalent level to the TD children. This was despite the TD children outperforming the autistic children on the standardized face memory task. ConclusionsThese preliminary findings suggest that group differences between autistic and TD children may not always emerge on an ecologically valid, real world eyewitness identification lineup task, despite autistic children showing poorer performance on a standardized face memory task. However, as identification performance in both groups was low, it remains important for future research to identify how to scaffold eyewitness identification performance in both children with and without an autism diagnosis.

Research suggests autistic children learn and generalize visual family-resemblance categories atypically (e.g., Church, et al., 2010, 2015), particularly when learning incidentally from exposure. This may reflect differences in perceptual learning (Mercado et al., 2020). However, it is unknown whether perceptual discrimination learning is also atypical and if differences extend to other modalities. To address this, autistic children with normal language abilities and IQ and typically developing (TD) matched comparison children completed auditory and visual discrimination tasks, after either incidental exposure to or direct training with stimuli presented in either progressive (easy-to-hard) or random orders of difficulty. In the visual task, both autistic and TD children only performed well after progressive training, suggesting limited perceptual learning from incidental visual exposure. In the auditory task, autistic children showed a progressive learning advantage after both exposure and training, but TD children only showed this advantage after training. They also had significantly better auditory discrimination than TD children after progressive training. These findings suggest typical visual discrimination learning after progressive training and enhanced auditory discrimination learning after progressive training and exposure. This enhanced auditory perceptual learning may help explain why these autistic children are socially impaired while retaining the capacity to learn language.