Reasoning in social versus non-social domains and its relation to autistic traits.

Enhanced rationality has been linked to higher levels of autistic traits, characterised by increased deliberation and decreased intuition, alongside reduced susceptibility to common reasoning biases. However, it is unclear whether this is domain-specific or domain-general. We aimed to explore whether reasoning tendencies differ across social and non-social domains in relation to autistic traits.

Autistic people differ from non-autistic people subjectively, but not objectively in their reasoning.

Autistic people often experience challenges in social contexts, and when decisions need to be made quickly. There is evidence showing that autistic people have a tendency for greater deliberation and lower intuition, compared to non-autistic people. This has led to the researchers' proposal that autism is associated with an enhanced level of rationality.

The link between anxiety and theory of mind in children: A meta-analysis.

Background: The ability to reason about someone else's mental states, an ability known as theory of mind, is essential to help children navigate social life. However, not all children are socially skilled. Given socialisation is key for healthy development in children, finding what might exacerbate these difficulties is important.

Qualitative interview with mothers of moderately or late preterm infants in the UK: where are the care gaps?

Introduction: Preterm birth (<37 gestational weeks) accounts for an increasing proportion of global births each year, with moderately or late preterm birth (MLPT) (32-36 gestational weeks) comprising over 80% of all preterm births. Despite the frequency, MLPT births represent only a small fraction of prematurity research, with research exploring the parental experiences of having a child born MLPT particularly neglected. It is vital this perspective is considered to provide appropriate grounding for future research and service provision.

Exploring an objective measure of overactivity in children with rare genetic syndromes.

Background: Overactivity is prevalent in several rare genetic neurodevelopmental syndromes, including Smith-Magenis syndrome, Angelman syndrome, and tuberous sclerosis complex, although has been predominantly assessed using questionnaire techniques. Threats to the precision and validity of questionnaire data may undermine existing insights into this behaviour. Previous research indicates objective measures, namely actigraphy, can effectively differentiate non-overactive children from those with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Three key questions to move towards a theoretical framework of visuospatial perspective taking.

What would a theory of visuospatial perspective taking (VSPT) look like? Here, ten researchers in the field, many with different theoretical viewpoints and empirical approaches, present their consensus on the three big questions we need to answer in order to bring this theory (or these theories) closer.

Personality traits as risk factors for relapse or recurrence in major depression: a systematic review.

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly recurrent. Identifying risk factors for relapse in depression is essential to improve prevention plans and therapeutic outcomes. Personality traits and personality disorders are widely considered to impact outcomes in MDD.

Changes in parental sleep from pregnancy to postpartum: A meta-analytic review of actigraphy studies.

Sleep changes in new parents are widely observed but there is no extant meta-analysis of changes to sleep parameters in this group. We completed a meta-analysis of changes in actigraphy-measured parent sleep between pregnancy and the end of the first year of a child's life. A search of six databases was completed.

What Is the Prevalence of Visual Hallucinations in a First-Episode Psychosis Population? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Literature.

Background And Hypothesis: This systematic review and meta-analysis review the literature regarding the prevalence of visual hallucinations in patients with first-episode psychosis. Previous reviews have focused on the prevalence of visual hallucinations in a general psychosis population, highlighting a weighted prevalence of 27%. However, no reviews have focused specifically on the experiences of those with a first episode of psychosis.

Are knowledge- and belief-reasoning automatic, and is this the right question?

Phillips et al. conclude that current evidence supports knowledge-, but not belief-reasoning as being automatic. We suggest four reasons why this is an oversimplified answer to a question that might not have a clear-cut answer: (1) knowledge and beliefs can be incompletely equated to perceptual states, (2) sensitivity to mental states does not necessitate representation, (3) automaticity is not a single categorical feature, and (4) how we represent others' minds is dependent on social context.

The prevalence and profile of autism in individuals born preterm: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Introduction: Preterm birth (<37 weeks) adversely affects development in behavioural, cognitive and mental health domains. Heightened rates of autism are identified in preterm populations, indicating that prematurity may confer an increased likelihood of adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. The present meta-analysis aims to synthesise existing literature and calculate pooled prevalence estimates for rates of autism characteristics in preterm populations.

Anxiety and intellectual functioning in autistic children: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Autistic 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.

Multi-Method Assessment of Sleep in Children With Angelman Syndrome: A Case-Controlled Study.

To assess sleep quality and timing in children with Angelman syndrome (AS) with sleep problems using questionnaires and actigraphy and contrast sleep parameters to those of typically developing (TD) children matched for age and sex. Week-long actigraphy assessments were undertaken with children with AS (n = 20) with parent-reported sleep difficulties and compared with age and sex matched TD controls. The presence of severe sleep problems was assessed using the modified Simonds and Parraga sleep questionnaire.

Sleep in children with Smith-Magenis syndrome: a case-control actigraphy study.

Study Objectives: The objectives of the study were (1) to compare both actigraphy and questionnaire-assessed sleep quality and timing in children with Smith-Magenis syndrome (SMS) to a chronologically age-matched typically developing (TD) group and (2) to explore associations between age, nocturnal and diurnal sleep quality, and daytime behavior.

Methods: Seven nights of actigraphy data were collected from 20 children with SMS (mean age 8.70; SD 2.

Measuring visual perspective taking in the brain with avatars and arrows: Which question are we asking?

There is an ongoing debate about the involvement of Theory of Mind (ToM) processes in Visual Perspective Taking (VPT). In an fMRI study (Schurz et al., 2015), we borrowed the positive features from a novel VPT task - which is widely used in behavioral research - to study previously overlooked experimental factors in neuroimaging studies.

Sleep duration and sleep quality in people with and without intellectual disability: A meta-analysis.

This study provides the first meta-analysis of the purported differences in sleep time and sleep quality between people with and without intellectual disabilities. Twenty-one papers were identified that compared sleep time and/or sleep quality in people with and without intellectual disabilities. The meta-analysis of sleep time revealed that people with an intellectual disability slept for 18 min less, on average, than people without an intellectual disability.

The impact of sleep deprivation on visual perspective taking.

Total sleep deprivation (TSD) is known to alter cognitive processes. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to its impact on social cognition. Here, we investigated whether TSD alters levels-1 and -2 visual perspective-taking abilities, i.

I've got your number: Spontaneous perspective-taking in an interactive task.

Thinking about how other people represent objects in the world around them is thought to require deliberate effort. In recent years, interactive "joint action" paradigms have shown how social context can affect our cognitive processing. We tested whether people would represent their partner's point of view in a simple team game.

Unintentional perspective-taking calculates whether something is seen, but not how it is seen.

A long established distinction exists in developmental psychology between young children's ability to judge whether objects are seen by another, known as "level-1" perspective-taking, and judging how the other sees those objects, known as "level-2" perspective-taking (Flavell, Everett, Croft, & Flavell, 1981a; Flavell, Flavell, Green, & Wilcox, 1981b). Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, and Bodley Scott (2010) provided evidence that there are two routes available to adults for level-1 perspective-taking: one which is triggered relatively automatically and the other requiring cognitive control. We tested whether both these routes were available for adults' level-2 perspective-taking.

A Second Look at Automatic Theory of Mind: Reconsidering Kovács, Téglás, and Endress (2010).

In recent work, Kovács, Téglás, and Endress (2010) argued that human adults automatically represented other agents' beliefs even when those beliefs were completely irrelevant to the task being performed. In a series of 13 experiments, we replicated these previous findings but demonstrated that the effects found arose from artifacts in the experimental paradigm. In particular, the critical findings demonstrating automatic belief computation were driven by inconsistencies in the timing of an attention check, and thus do not provide evidence for automatic theory of mind in adults.

Clarifying the role of theory of mind areas during visual perspective taking: Issues of spontaneity and domain-specificity.

Visual perspective taking is a fundamental feature of the human social brain. Previous research has mainly focused on explicit visual perspective taking and contrasted brain activation for other- versus self-perspective judgements. This produced a conceptual gap to theory of mind studies, where researchers mainly compared activation for taking another's mental perspective to non-mental control conditions.

The use of embodied self-rotation for visual and spatial perspective-taking.

Previous research has shown that calculating if something is to someone's left or right involves a simulative process recruiting representations of our own body in imagining ourselves in the position of the other person (Kessler and Rutherford, 2010). We compared left and right judgements from another's spatial position (spatial perspective judgements) to judgements of how a numeral appeared from another's point of view (visual perspective judgements). Experiment 1 confirmed that these visual and spatial perspective judgements involved a process of rotation as they became more difficult with angular disparity between the self and other.