Children with autism were compared with control groups on their ability to make moral judgements. Participants were presented with pairs of vignettes in which actions were either deliberate or accidental and caused injury to a person or damage to property. Participants were asked to judge which protagonist was the naughtier and to verbally justify this judgement. Results showed that the children with autism were as likely as controls to judge culpability on the basis of motive, and to judge injury to persons as more culpable than damage to property. Children with autism also offered some appropriate verbal justifications for their judgments although most justifications were of poor quality and reiterated the story. Results are discussed in terms of theory of mind and the possible role of deficits in complex reasoning and executive functions.

Contrary to empirical reports of inhibitory dysfunction in ADHD, parental reports suggest that when playing computer games, the inhibitory abilities of children with ADHD are unimpaired. This small-scale preliminary investigation into this phenomenon looks at inhibition of an ongoing response and activity exhibited by children with ADHD between 6 and 14 years old on two commercially available games, on the Conners's Continuous Performance Test II (CPT II), and on a more game-like version of the same task that incorporates characteristics commonly found in commercially available computer games. The performance of participants with ADHD on commercially available games is equivalent to that of typically developing participants and is significantly better on the more game-like version of the CPT II.

This study demonstrates a reduced cytotoxic effect to the TEOM by reducing the temperature of the tissue during chemotherapy treatment and suggests that decreasing the temperature to 20°C could have clinical advantages.

No abstract

Twenty-two children with autism were given four tests of false belief understanding: the Sally-Anne task, two variants of the deceptive box task, and the three boxes task. The overall consistency of the children's performance was high, 77 percent of the participants either passing or failing all of the tasks. The convergent validity (across-task consistency) of the deceptive box and the three boxes paradigms was high, and the convergent validity of the three boxes and Sally-Anne tasks was also acceptable. However, a weaker level of convergent validity was found for the deceptive box and Sally-Anne tasks, suggesting that these paradigms test slightly different aspects of cognition. The reliability (within-child consistency) of the children's performances across two versions of the deceptive box task was high. These findings are discussed in terms of their practical implications for practitioners and researchers.