PSYC 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Cognitive Training, Emotional And Behavioral Disorders
16 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
PSYC 212 – Lecture 23 – April 12th
Perception in Mental Disorders (Dr. Bertone)
• ASD: widespread disorder of association cortex, development of connectivity; only
secondarily as a behavioural disorder.
• Autism is defined by two symptom domains: (1) persistent deficits in social
communication and social interactions, and (2) restricted, repetitive patterns of
behaviour, interests, or activities.
• Dr. Bertone’s favourite definition of autism: a neurogenetic condition where polygenetic
changes affect development of the neural networks underlying affect, cognition,
language, and perception at multiple levels in each domain.
• Two major theories in autism: (1) weak central coherence (WCC) account – problems
integrating information; not autism-specific, and (2) enhanced perceptual functioning
(EPF) model – when given a task where local or detailed information processing is
available, persons with autism will outperform non-autistic participants; autism-specific.
• Younger participants with autism reduced their reactivity to perturbing information.
• Dr. Bertone: measuring intelligence in autism → use nonverbal test.
o Problem: ~80% of data works with kids who are high functioning.
• Existing attention-training paradigms aren’t optimal for kids with ASD/
neurodevelopmental disorders.
• We can improve attention using cognitive training in neurodevelopmental conditions.
