There is equivocal evidence as to whether there is a deficit in recognising emotional expressions in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study compared emotion recognition in ASD in three types of emotion expression media (still image, dynamic image, auditory) across human stimuli (e.g. photo of a human face) and animated stimuli (e.g. cartoon face). Participants were 37 adolescents (age 11-16) with a diagnosis of ASD (33 male, 4 female). 42 males and 39 females served as typically developing, age-matched controls. Overall there was significant advantage for control groups over the ASD group for emotion recognition in human stimuli but not animated stimuli, across modalities. For static animated images specifically, those with ASD significantly outperformed controls. The findings are consistent with the ASD group using atypical explicit strategies.

Children and adults with autism spectrum disorder have been found to have deficits in metacognition that could impact upon their learning. This study explored metacognitive monitoring in 28 (23 males and 5 females) participants with autism spectrum disorder and 56 (16 males and 40 females) typically developing controls who were being educated at the same level. Participants were asked a series of mathematics questions. Based upon previous research, after each question they were asked two metacognitive questions: (1) whether they thought they had got the answer correct or not (or ‘don’t know’) and (2) whether they meant to get the answer correct or not (or ‘don’t know’). Participants with autism spectrum disorder were significantly more likely than the typically developing group to erroneously think that they had got an incorrect answer correct. Having made an error, those with autism spectrum disorder were also significantly more likely to report that they had meant to make the error. Different patterns in the types of errors made were also identified between the two groups. Deficits in metacognition were identified for the autism spectrum disorder group in the learning of mathematics. This is consistent with metacognitive research from different contexts and the implications for supporting learning in autism spectrum disorder are discussed.

People with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often take longer to make decisions. The Autism-Psychosis Model proposes that people with autism and psychosis show the opposite pattern of results on cognitive tasks. As those with psychosis show a jump-to-conclusions reasoning bias, those with ASD should show a circumspect reasoning bias. Jumping-to-conclusions was assessed in a sample of 20 adolescents with ASD and 23 age-matched controls using the jumping-to-conclusions beads task. Both groups demonstrated equivalent levels of confidence in decision-making, however the ASD group required more beads than controls before making their decision. Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between the beads required and degree of autism symptoms. Consistent with the Autism-Psychosis Model, a more circumspect reasoning bias was evident in ASD.

Background: People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) report heightened olfaction. Previous sensory experiments in people with ASC have reported hypersensitivity across visual, tactile, and auditory domains, but not olfaction. The aims of the present study were to investigate olfactory sensitivity in ASC, and to test the association of sensitivity to autistic traits.Methods: We recruited 17 adult males diagnosed with ASC and 17 typical adult male controls and tested their olfactory sensitivity using the Alcohol Sniff Test (AST), a standardised clinical evaluation of olfactory detection. The AST involves varying the distance between subject and stimulus until an odour is barely detected. Participants with ASC also completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) as a measure of autism traits.Results: The ASC group detected the odour at a mean distance of 24.1 cm (SD = 11.5) from the nose, compared to the control group, who detected it at a significantly shorter mean distance of 14.4 cm (SD = 5.9). Detection distance was independent of age and IQ for both groups, but showed a significant positive correlation with autistic traits in the ASC group (r = 0.522).Conclusions: This is the first experimental demonstration, as far as the authors are aware, of superior olfactory perception in ASC and showing that greater olfactory sensitivity is correlated with a higher number of autistic traits. This is consistent with results from previous findings showing hypersensitivity in other sensory domains and may help explain anecdotal and questionnaire accounts of heightened olfactory sensitivity in ASC. Results are discussed in terms of possible underlying neurophysiology.

Why would the UK government fund Cambridge University and a Manchesterbased production company to make a series of children’s animation? After all, professional-quality animation doesn’t come cheap. The answer is that this new animation has been designed to be both entertainment (for preschoolers) and educational: to help children learn to recognise emotions. The government body in question is Culture Online, part of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, set up five years ago. Their brief was to create innovative new applications of the new multimedia, with the specific mission of ‘reducing exclusion’ in society. Their commissioning executive, Claire Harcup, considered children with autism to be a group who remain excluded from society, because of their neurologically based difficulties in forming social relationships. Claire contacted us at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge University to discuss a project. We had already developed a DVD for teaching emotion-recognition to people aged eight and above on the autistic spectrum, called Mind Reading: The Interactive Guide to Emotion (1). Research has shown that using the DVD for two hours a week over a 10- week period leads to significant improvement in emotion recognition among people with autism spectrum conditions (2). So our experience on that earlier project persuaded us that there are methods that can make a difference to people with this disability. Just as a child with dyslexia can be helped significantly by using tailored educational software to ease them into reading words, so a child with autism can be helped in the same way to understand emotions and read them from faces. Despite dyslexia being a form of wordblindness, and autism being a form of mind-blindness (3), neither of these conditions is beyond remediation. We took up the challenge offered by Culture Online by proposing to make an animated series called The Transporters. Whereas Mind Reading required children to be able to play a computer game, clicking a mouse, or to be supervised by a teacher or adult who could help them do this, The Transporters was aimed at relatively neglected (‘excluded’) people on the autistic spectrum: those with significant learning difficulties, and preschoolers. Neither of these two groups may have the ability or interest to use a computer, but both of these two groups enjoy watching animated films about vehicles. So why do they love watching films about vehicles? According to one theory, children and adults with autism spectrum conditions are strong systemisers (4,5). They are drawn to predictable, rule-based systems, whether these are repeating mathematical patterns, or repeating electrical patterns (e.g. light switches), or repeating patterns in films. They love lawful repetition. It is ironic that Kanner, who first described autism in 1943, drew attention to this feature of autism (what he called their ‘need for sameness’ and their ‘resistance to change’) and yet it has been the social difficulties they have which have been the main focus of psychological research. At the core of autism is an ability to deal effortlessly with systems because they do not change and they are the same every time, and a disabling difficulty in dealing with the social world because it is always changing unpredictably and is different every time. It is worth noting that the two other major theories of autism that try to explain the non-social factors in autism – the weak central coherence theory (6) and the executive dysfunction theory (7) – have no parsimonious way of explaining this love of lawful repetition that is a hallmark of autism. According to the hyper- systemizing theory (5), vehicles whose motion is determined only by physical rules (such as vehicles that can only go back and forth along linear tracks) would be much preferred by children with autism over vehicles like planes or cars, whose motion could be highly variable, moving at the whim of the human driver operating them. So we proposed to make a children’s animation series based around eight characters who are all vehicles using such physical, rule based motion. Such vehicles would grab the attention of both preschoolers with autism and those so-called ‘low functioning’ children with autism with significant learning difficulties. Onto these vehicles we would graft real-life faces of actors, validated for the emotion that they were meant to be conveying, and contextualise them in entertaining social interactions between the toy vehicles. Culture Online loved the idea and found a leading production company for us to work with. We created a whole family of different toy vehicles running on tracks or cables, who have limited freedom of motion: two trams, two cable cars, a chain ferry, a funicular railway, a coach and a tractor. Since all of the characters were depicted as toys in a child’s bedroom, motion of the latter two was constrained in a Scalextric- like manner. Each of the 15 episodes lasts five minutes, and opens with a sequence panning around the boy’s bedroom where he plays with his toy vehicles. We then see the boy going off to school, and the vehicles ‘coming to life’, caught up in dramatic stories that enable the child watching to see different key emotions on the faces of the vehicles. The Transporters aims to teach not just some basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, disgust, fear, surprise) but also some more complex ones (ashamed, joking, jealous, proud, tired, sorry, kind, excited, worried, unfriendly and grumpy). Each short story is narrated (by actor Stephen Fry), but the series hopefully works even for a child without language, because the actions speak for themselves. The DVD is widely and freely available (see box). The hope is that through hours of repetitive TV watching, children with autism will tune into faces without even realising they are doing so. Why? Because unlike faces on the people in their own homes, which are attached to human bodies that move unpredictably and are therefore stressful and confusing, the faces in The Transporters are attached to mechanical bodies that move beautifully predictably. The wheels turn. Round and round and round. The gears on the wheels lift, up and down and up and down. The vehicles move, back and forth and back and forth. Beautifully soothing for a child with autism who has a ‘need for sameness’. Such systems, far from being confusing, are easy to understand because they are 100 per cent lawful, following the laws of mechanics, cause and effect. All you need in order to understand such mechanical motion are concepts like causality, temporal sequence, and contingency (If A, then B). And if you are a child who has difficulties with theory of mind or empathy, who finds it puzzling when a facial expression suddenly changes, the hope is that you could become familiar with how people look when they are surprised or afraid or proud through massive exposure to these patterns.

This study examines foetal testosterone (fT) levels (measured in amniotic fluid) as a candidate biological factor, influencing sex differences in systemizing. Systemizing is a cognitive process, defined as the drive to analyze or construct systems. A recent model of psychological sex differences suggests that this is a major dimension in which the sexes differ, with males being more drawn to systemize than females. Participants included 204 children (93 female), age 6–9 years, taking part in a long-term study on the effects of fT. The systemizing quotient – children’s version was administered to these mothers to answer on behalf of their child. Males (mean = 27.79 ± 7.64) scored significantly higher than females (mean = 22.59 ± 7.53), confirming that boys systemize to a greater extent than girls. Stepwise regression analysis revealed that fT was the only significant predictor of systemizing preference when the sexes were examined together. Sex was not included in the final regression model, suggesting that fT levels play a greater role than the child’s sex in terms of differences in systemizing preference. This study suggests that the levels of fT are a biological factor influencing cognitive sex differences and lends support to the empathizing–systemizing theory of sex differences.

Autism and Asperger Syndrome are autism spectrum conditions (ASC) characterized by deficits in understanding others' minds, an aspect of which involves recognizing emotional expressions. This is thought to be related to atypical function and structure of the amygdala, and performance by people with ASC on emotion recognition tasks resembles that seen in people with acquired amygdala damage. In general, emotion recognition findings in ASC have been inconsistent, which may reflect low numbers of participants, low numbers of stimuli and trials, heterogeneity of symptom severity within ASC groups, and ceiling effects on some tasks. The present study tested 39 male adults with ASC and 39 typical male controls on a task of basic emotion recognition from photographs, in two separate experiments. On a control face discrimination task the group with ASC were not impaired. People with ASC were less accurate on the emotion recognition task compared to controls, but only for the negative basic emotions. This is discussed in the light of similar findings from people with damage to the amygdala.

Empathy involves an understanding of what others are thinking and feeling, and enables us to interact in the social world. According to the Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) theory, females on average have a stronger drive to empathize than males. This sex difference may in part reflect developmental differences in brain structure and function, which are themselves under the influence of fetal testosterone (fT) Previous studies have found that fT is inversely correlated with social behaviors such as eye contact in infancy, peer relationships in preschoolers, and mentalistic interpretation of animate motion. Male fetuses are exposed to higher levels of testosterone than are female fetuses. The present study investigates empathizing in children, as a function of amniotic measures of fT. One hundred ninety-three mothers of children (100 males, 93 females) aged 6-8 years of age completed children's versions of the Empathy Quotient (EQ-C), and the children themselves were tested on "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Task (Eyes-C). All mothers had had amniocentesis during the 2nd trimester of pregnancy. There was a significant negative correlation between fT and scores on both measures. While empathy may be influenced by post-natal experience, these results suggest that pre-natal biology also plays an important role, mediated by androgen effects in the brain. These results also have implications for the causes of disabilities involving empathy, such as autism spectrum conditions, and may explain the increased rate of such conditions among males.