No abstract

The children complied with most requests. Some of our teaching goals were limited by technology or space while others were limited by the difficulty of presenting a task to the children in a way that was understandable within their environment. However, the opportunity to introduce this technology to children was an important first step in exploring the potential VR offers to understanding the perceptual processes involved in autism. Our results indicate that the will accept a VR helmet and wear it, identify familiar objects and qualities of these objects in their environment while using the helmet, and locate and move toward objects in their environment while wearing the helmet. More research is necessary to verify the potential in this area, especially to discover if learning experiences through VR generalize to other environments, but it appears virtual reality may provide a useful tool for furthering our understanding of autism and guiding efforts at treatment and intervention.

No abstract

The nature of family adaptation to severely and chronically disabling cognitive and behavioral conditions is considered. The relationship between atypical development and family response is examined to derive basic concepts—parents' perceptions of their child's unusual characteristics, effects on social relationships, etc.—and suggest strategies for intervention and research.

Utilizing standardization and validation data from the NEPSY, this study presents a reanalysis of the High-Functioning Autism (HFA) versus Typical samples using IQ as a covariate. The reanalysis in the present paper should prove important to clinicians and researchers by (1) determining if the original findings can be replicated for the HFA sample when controlling for IQ, and (2) providing neuropsychological description for children with HFA versus Typical children across the NEPSY variables. The sample included 23 children with HFA who ranged in age from 5 years 5 months to 12 years 11 months (Mean = 9.59 years). The HFA Group comprised 19 males, 22 Caucasians, and was 87% right handed. All of the parents had between 12 to 15 years of education. A Typical Group was selected from the standardization sample of the NEPSY and matched on the variables of chronological age, race, gender, parental education, and region of the country. A MANCOVA revealed significant group differences on 8 of the 14 core subtests of the NEPSY, with the HFA Group performing lower than the Typical Group. While these findings significantly overlapped with those from the original validation study, significant group differences also were uncovered for the subtests of Phonological Processing, Auditory Attention and Response Set, and Speeded Naming; Comprehension of Instructions and Narrative Memory were no longer significant after controlling for IQ. When the groups were compared with respect to the number of cases falling below the 10th percentile, the HFA Group showed a higher rate of occurrence on each subtest, but only significantly so on the Arrows Subtest. These findings provide additional support for the phenotypic neurocognitive presentation of individuals with HFA, and they suggest that the NEPSY can contribute to the neuropsychological description of children with HFA.