Asperger – What is it?
Asperger’s Disorder is a milder variant of Autistic Disorder. Both Asperger’s Disorder and High Functioning Autism are in fact subgroups of a larger diagnostic category called Autistic Spectrum Disorders. In Asperger’s Disorder, affected individuals are characterized by social isolation and eccentric behaviour in childhood. There are impairments in two-sided social interaction and non-verbal communication. Though grammatically correct, their speech is peculiar due to abnormalities of inflection and a repetitive pattern. They lack the higher pragmatics of language and thus have difficulties with conversation and negotiations. Clumsiness is prominent both in their articulation and gross motor behaviour. They usually have a circumscribed area of interest that usually leaves no space for more age appropriate, common interests. Some examples are cars, trains, fans, solar system, astronomy or history. The name “Asperger” comes from Hans Asperger, an Austrian physician who first described the syndrome in 1944.
High-functioning autism (HFA) is the condition of individuals who display some symptoms of autism but who are able to function close to or above a normal level in intelligence. HFA can be differentiated from Aspergers Syndrome, from the presence of linguistic delay.
What problems do people with Asperger’s syndrome and HFA have?
The difficulties that both Asperger’s and HFA have are often described as a ‘triad of impairments’ - a set of three difficulties:
- Difficulty in social relationships
- Difficulty in communication
- Difficulty in imagination.
The reduced abilities in socio-emotional competence results in difficulties in recognising emotions
The ability to understand emotions in children with AS or HFA
Baron-Cohen describes autism as a condition of mind blindness. They are unable to ‘see’ or recognise mental states especially in other people. A deficit in metarepresentation – an inability to develop mental representations for the contents of other people’s minds explains the lack of understanding of human emotions.
Persons with AS or HFA have difficulty reading body language and facial expressions. As a result of inadequate social-communicative abilities, their capacity to process information from people’s faces is also weak. Recent research has found that children with autism engage in atypical face recognition strategies that involve an unusual reliance on the mouth, and deficient processing of the eyes. In face identification, children with autism exhibit impaired eye recognition even when they are cued to attend to the eye region, and exhibit impaired processing of eyes but intact processing of mouths across measures of holistic face recognition.
Use of Computers to teach human emotions to children with autism.
Computers are led by the user’s choices, and offer a highly simplified and positively reinforcing environment they can be of great benefit to people with autism. Computer use offers a flexible means of providing opportunities for people with autism in education and communication. Research has noted the value of computers, both therapeutically and educationally, to people with autistic spectrum disorders. Many people with autistic spectrum disorders seem to have monotropic interest systems: their attention tends to be fixed on isolated objects which are viewed as though through a tunnel, apart from the surrounding context. Computers are an ideal resource to break into this world because they ‘start where the child is’, allowing cotropical interaction, by allowing others to join the individual’s attention tunnel. External events can be more easily ignored when focusing on a computer screen, as the area of concentration is limited to the bounds of the screen. The small area of focus might explain why some people with autism can tolerate higher sensory input via a computer than they can apparently tolerate elsewhere.
Some other advantages of computers for individuals with autism are that computers:
- Are predictable and, therefore, controllable
- Enable errors to be made safely
- Offer a highly perfectible medium
The fact that computers will reliably carry on doing the same thing over and over, allows a person with autism to do an activity repeatedly and for very long periods of time.
Because computers offer a sometimes context-free environment in which many people with autism feel comfortable. However, teaching with computer focuses on one part of a person’s autism (recognising people’s facial expressions for example) and May only is useful if used as part of a wider curriculum. It also requires the ability learnt with a computer to be generalised in real life and in real natural situations.
Fore more information on Asperger’s Syndrome please refer to the Information on Disorders page.
