This course is heavily focused on the current issues and trends within special education with a specific focus on research. As such, this assignment affords you the opportunity to examine and analyze different topics in the literature that relates to the current module’s readings. Furthermore, your research in the literature will help you respond to the module’s Discussion Assignment and potentially, your Literature Review Assignment, which is the crux of the course. You should use these journal critiques as a guide to the type of research required for your Literature Review Assignment.
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Autism
Student’s name: Date:
Research Questions
1. Do Students with Autism spectrum disorder have diminished neural activity during gameplay with a person in social attention, social interactions, and social learning?
Experimental designs
Data used an interactive fMRI task, interpersonal competitive game, social learning Domino game to study mentalizing and motivation (Assaf et al., 2013). Thirteen individuals from different institutes with increased functioning ASDs and ages between 12 and 24 years, and 14 other healthy controls played fMRI Domino games against a computer opponent. They were led to believe it was a human opponent.
Summary of Methods
Thirteen individuals with high-functioning (FSIQ > 70) Autism spectrum disorder age between 12 to 24 years and ten men were recruited from different institutions mainly by word of mouth and advertisements.
The diagnosis of Autism Spectrum disorder to all individuals was made through the observational tool.
Fourteen typical development controls TD (ages between 11–23 and 11 males) were also recruited by advertisements in learning institutions and the Olin center website and by word of mouth. Again, autism spectrum disorder was ruled out in typical development controls.
Participants with FSIQ < 70 and any other MRI contraindication were excluded from the study. Eight of the 13 participants with autism spectrum disorder were given medication when scanned. Five of the participants received CNS stimulants, three received atypical antipsychotic drugs, while the other four received SSRI/SNRIs.
Results
The results showed that typical developmental controls with ASDs took their human opponents’ moves into account while playing and did more in the human than computer-opponent runs (Assaf et al., 2013). There was no significant effect of group or a group by Opponent Type interaction.
Commentary
The study showed that individuals with high ASDs function failed to show the typically increased activation in MTG during mentalizing processing in a social context.
Reference
Assaf, M., Hyatt, C. J., Wong, C. G., Johnson, M. R., Schultz, R. T., Hendler, T., & Pearlson, G. D. (2013). Mentalizing and motivation neural function during social interactions in autism spectrum disorders. NeuroImage Clinical, 3, 321-331.
