Download Some of Professor Caldwell-Harris`s summer interns, 2009

Student Research on Aspergers
Syndrome and Cognitive Styles,
Sept-June, 2012
Catherine Caldwell-Harris,
Associate Professor,
Psychology Department
Overview and brief history of the
project
• This project is a continuation of my
prior project funded by GUTS titled
Student Research Internship on
Autism. In fall 2008 I responded to
students interested in autism by
suggesting that we analyze blogs
and forum postings by individuals
with high functioning autism and
Aspergers Syndrome. The
following summer we created an
online survey and successfully
recruited 70 individuals selfdiagnosed with Aspergers
Syndrome (AS).
Some of Professor Caldwell-Harris’s
summer interns, 2009
• For fall 2010, students designed a
laboratory visit to learn more about
social information processing, local
processing bias, religious belief,
intentionality, and in those with AS
compared with neurotypicals. By
spring 2011, we realized it was not
viable to get large numbers of persons
with an AS diagnosis into the lab,
although we did recruit 10 persons
with AS and 25 who had OCD. For the
2011-2012 academic year, my students
and I decided to broaden our question
to encompass a continuum of
cognitive styles. This is consistent with
a burgeoning literature on individual
differences in the fields of cognition,
personality and brain sciences, as
exemplified in a recent book called
Neurodiversity.
Ideas about a continuum of
cognitive/personality styles
• Our group investigated the idea that persons
with low sociality and local processing bias that
often characterizes AS is an extreme end of a
continuum which includes persons in the normal
population. To test this idea in fall 2012 we
recruited engineering, math and computer
science majors, thus allowing us to study
persons who may have a cognitive style that is
intermediate between those with AS and
typically developing individuals.
Our broad perspective means that students are not
just trained in one sub-discipline in psychology, but
exposed to research ideas from the following fields:
•Cognitive psychology: understanding variations
in information processing. Those with AS may focus
on details and pursue work/hobbies like math and
computer programming. Neurotypicals frequently
take the big picture and usually have global
processing bias when performing neurocognitive
tasks.
•Social psychology: Those with AS often have
social anxiety or just aren't interest in the social
world, and prefer social activities like sports and
volunteering.
•Personality: Those with AS may have a
preference for sameness; neurotypicals vary widely
of course but often are open to new experiences.
Training Goals for Undergraduates
The primary goal of the project is to give undergraduates
hands-on experiences in psychology laboratory research.
New lab members typically start by helping existing lab
members with whatever they are working on at the
present. This can include:
• recruiting and running participants in
laboratory tasks
• organizing data in a spread sheet, preliminary
data analysis (getting means, correlations,
percentages)
• hypothesis testing using a stat package like
SPSS (this is usually done after training with
Professor Caldwell-Harris on the stat package;
the lab has manuals like SPSS for dummies .
Doing now what you will do when you
are a graduate student:
• find journal articles to help design a new task or
understand existing results
• prepare an application to the Institutional Review Board
to conduct a new experiment
• brain storm about a new task and design it
• Present analyses or ideas for a new task during a weekly
lab meeting
• write papers (required for directed study and work-fordistinction)
• prepare posters for presentation at the October UROP
poster session or for a conference
• draft papers that will be submitted to a journal submit
abstracts to a conference
Two students completed Work for Distinction:
Tessa Velazquez and Sohni Patel
Tessa Velazquez
This picture shows Tessa
presenting her work at the
Cognitive Neuroscience Society
Meeting (CNS), Chicago, IL,
March 31-April.
Tessa Velazquez is the primary project
coordinator with the most years of experience.
She has worked on the religion/cognitive styles
project since her freshman year. In fall 2011,
Tessa trained and supervised other lab
members (who are named below) while they
collected data from an additional 30 research
participants. In December 2011, as well as in
the spring, Tessa analyzed and wrote up a
section of the data for her Work for Distinction.
Her WFD panel consisted of internationally
renowned Autism expert Dr. Helen TagerFlusberg and Theology and Philosophy
professor Dr. Welsley Wildman (plus Prof. CH). Her hour-long oral examination led to a
spirited discussion. All members of the panel
agreed that Tessa's work should be submitted
for publication, after additional analysis and
writing.
Caitlin Murphy
Tessa presented poster with lab Alumna Caitlin
Fox Murphy, who did her WFD in 2010. Both
presenters reported that their poster was very
popular and they were kept busy with visitors
throughout the official poster session time.
They received emails from as far away as the
UK about their project.
• Sohni Patel, who joined the project in
fall 2011, presented her Work for
Distinction to committee members
Jackie Liederman and Michelle Rucci.
• Her thesis was titled,
• Does the quality of social interaction in
individuals with Aspergers Syndrome
improve when discussing special
interests?
Sohni Patel
She analyzed an innovative task
designed by our team, called the
peer conversation task. Results
partially supported our
hypotheses. A figured from her
WFD oral exam is attached. This
shows that individuals who had
more of a systemizing cognitive
style (as defined by Simon
Baron-Cohen's questionnaire),
the more signs of social anxiety
they showed when interviewed
by an interlocutor who was
disinterested in the conversation.
Sohni's analyses will pave the
way for a future revision of this
task.
Meláni Glassman, senior
• Meláni ran participants and made crucial suggestions for
increasing the amount of students being recruited. She
argued that we should recruit art students and poetry/fiction
writers to determine if they have more global processing bias
and an ability to make "far associations." She proposed the
hypothesis that people who are highly spiritual (but not
necessarily religious) will be those for whom "everything is
connected" because their brains excel at holistic information
processing.
•Global processors may have an information processing
style that takes in disparate, probabilistic information.
These people may be particularly creative.
Allison Daley, senior
Allison supervised the interns in data collection and
analysis of a particular task, the Social Attribution
Task, which has become famous over the last few
decades. It is common for people who watch a video
of these geometric shapes interacting to refer to them
as agentive actors. People talk about a big shape
chasing or a small one hiding; social roles and
emotions are typically ascribed. Persons with autism
are less like to do this social attribution. Allison
extended this finding to the continuum running from
AS to neurotypical. She is the first person to
administer this task to neurotypicals since the 1960s,
when it was conducted with an all-female sample of
Wellesely college students. Her close reading of the
original studies revealed that contemporary college
students told different types of narratives than the
ones found in the earlier studies.
Allison is continuing to analyze her data in
preparation for journal submission.
Heider and Simmel Movie
Duney Roberts, senior
Liwc
photo
Duney analyzed blogs of those with AS
and compared them to a matched set of
blogs of neurotypicals. He worked with
masters student Solomon Posner and
sophomore Jen Saigal. The three
students worked together using a
computer program, Linguistic Inquiry
and Word Count, to determine if
language used by persons with AS differs
from that of neurotypicals.
Duney and volunteers Solomon and Jen
found:
Persons with AS, compared to age and
gender matched neurotypicals, had more
formal language, evidenced by using
longer words and more punctuation, less
use of personal pronouns “we” and
“our”; when 'we' was used it was more
likely to be in a generic sense of we
humans. Neurotypicals used the “we” to
refer to participation in a group social
activity. Those with AS reported more
discussion of abstract topics, less about
actual incidents in their lives; wrote less
about activities with family and friends.
Danielle Martinez, junior, assisted Tessa Velazquez and
started a new project to put the Rosset Intentionality
Bias Survey into a Qualtrix survey. Our goal is to
return to the survey method we used in 2010, where we
recruited 70 persons with AS to complete a survey.
Danielle designed the new survey with help of lab
members, and then implemented it in Qualtrix. She
then wrote the IRB application.
The new project is currently being reviewed by the
Charles River campus Institutional Review Board.
Danielle Martinez
Kelly Fanty
Kelly Fanty, junior, has volunteered
since fall 2010. She ran participants
in the fall and helped Allison Daley.
She will conduct her Work for
Distinction in this lab in the fall.
Nalini Basdeo and Alex Yellin
• offered valuable assistance during 2010-2011,
helping primarily with Allison Daley’s analysis of
the audiotapes describing reactions to the
geometric shapes (i.e., social attribution task).
We have a student first authored paper in press!
Jordan, C.J. & Caldwell-Harris, C.L. (in press). Understanding
differences in neurotypical and autism spectrum special interests
through internet discussion forums. Intellectual and Developmental
Disabilities.
• Chloe Jordan helped co-found this project with Prof C-H in 2009.
• Now a doctoral student at BU, Chloe conducts neuroscience
research on drug addiction in rats. She continues to be interested in
a range of questions in the behavioral sciences and hopes to return
to human research at some later point in her career. This
publication will document to people who view her vita that she has
expertise in diverse scientific areas.
Thanks to Julia Krasnow,
summer intern 2012, for
helping to design and
construct this powerpoint.