Joint attention difficulties in autistic adults: An interactive eye-tracking study.

Joint attention - the ability to coordinate attention with a social partner - is critical for social communication, learning and the regulation of interpersonal relationships. Infants and young children with autism demonstrate impairments in both initiating and responding to joint attention bids in naturalistic settings. However, little is known about joint attention abilities in adults with autism.

A Cognitive Overview of Limb Apraxia.

Since the first studies on limb apraxia carried out by Hugo Liepmann more than a century ago, research interests focused on the way humans process manual gestures by assessing gesture production after patients suffered neurologic deficits. Recent reviews centered their attention on deficits in gesture imitation or processing object-related gestures, namely pantomimes and transitive gestures, thereby neglecting communicative/intransitive gestures. This review will attempt to reconcile limb apraxia in its entirety.

Exploring the relationship between technology use, hearing help-seeking, and hearing aid outcomes in older adults.

Objective: The objective of this study was to explore technology use and its relationship to help-seeking for hearing impairment (HI) and success with hearing aids among older adults. Previous research had suggested a link between higher levels of technology use and hearing aid success.

Design: General technology use was evaluated using a purposefully developed 25-item questionnaire.

Exploring the relationship between gestural recognition and imitation: evidence of dyspraxia in autism spectrum disorders.

In this study, the relationship between gesture recognition and imitation was explored. Nineteen individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were compared to a control group of 23 typically developing children on their ability to imitate and recognize three gesture types (transitive, intransitive, and pantomimes). The ASD group performed more poorly than controls on all tasks of recognition and imitation.

Brief report: imitation of meaningless gestures in individuals with Asperger syndrome and High-Functioning Autism.

Nineteen people with Asperger syndrome (AS)/High-Functioning Autism (HFA) (ages 7-15) were tested on imitation of two types of meaningless gesture: hand postures and finger positions. The individuals with AS/HFA achieved lower scores in the imitation of both hand and finger positions relative to a matched neurotypical group. The between-group difference was primarily accounted for by performance on a test of visual motor integration, together with a hand imitation deficit which was specifically due to errors in body part orientation.