Publications by authors named "Kaitlyn E May"

Article Synopsis
  • Kids with autism sometimes find it hard to understand what other people are thinking and to use language correctly in different situations.
  • Recent studies showed that these skills are connected and that understanding others helps with communication.
  • Researchers looked at brain scans of 1,295 people to see how autism affects these skills and found that certain brain areas don’t work like they do in non-autistic people when doing related tasks.
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Sentences that have more than one possible meaning are said to be syntactically ambiguous (SA). Because the correct interpretation of these sentences can be unclear, resolving SA sentences can be cognitively demanding for children, particularly with regards to inhibitory control (IC). In this study we provide three lines of evidence supporting the importance of IC in SA resolution.

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Despite decades of research, the brain basis of aberrant face processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remains a topic of debate. The mid-fusiform sulcus (MFS), a minor feature of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, provides new directions for studying face processing. The MFS closely aligns with face-selective cortical patches and other structural and functional divisions of the fusiform gyrus; however, it has received little attention in clinical populations.

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Higher cognitive functions in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by impairments in executive functions (EF). While some research attributes this to an overreliance of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), others demonstrate poor recruitment of the PFC in individuals with ASD. In order to assess the emerging consensus across neuroimaging studies of EF in ASD, the current study used a coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analysis of 16 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, resulting in a meta-analysis of data from 739 participants (356 ASD, 383 typically developing [TD] individuals) ranging from 7 to 52 years of age.

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Children judge in-group members more favorably than out-group members. They also judge moral transgressions as more serious and more worthy of punishment than conventional transgressions. Here we asked whether children's judgments of moral and conventional transgressions vary by the group membership of the transgressor (in-group, neutral, out-group, or self).

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