Uta Frith's comment

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Apparently the neurptypical scientists-to-be were testing the relationship between tapping on the box and a boat appearing inside the box.
The autistic kids didn't engage in magical thinking.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

Yes.

When I watched the sequence with this experiment I thought: this behavioural pattern is the origin of copy and paste programming. "Social" learning at its "best".

Software in the right hands could be a powerful tool. But the law of large numbers rules.

Yes, and exactly for those reasons professionals are required to screen for personality disorders and other possible conditions like social anxiety before assessing for asd.

There are a lot of quotes Uta Firth quotes in this blog I happened to stumble across across written by a person with asperger's syndrome:

http://www.autismandempathy.com/?p=1057

Here is the first:

Well it doesn't really punch me in the gut, but I think looking at this comment and the comments quoted in this blog will help tp put things into perspective. Here are a couple more:


How do people think/feel about these comments.I will not give my opinon right now except to say I think she is painting her picture with a very broad brush. To Ojani, who has written me a couple of times that the video is intended to general public, I get the feeling that this kind of presentation is her personal style and the sytle of a lot of people, including autistic people, too. I think there is some value in presenting material in this way . Depending on the context. It can be either good or bad, but how anybody thinks she's helping autistic people is beyond me.

One person said she helped to move the focus away from the refrigerator mother theory to a neurological origin. My guess is she probably just followed along with a certain trend and tendency that was developing at that time regarding research, much like tapping on the box before sliding it open:-) Sliding the box open meant furthering her profession. And, by the way, I see autistic people doing plenty of magical thinking and have caught myself doing it, too.

I suppose I am more on the 'side' of the children who just slid the box open, though I think as a child I may have done the tapping in a research situation as I might have thought it smarter to do that since I was a child who was slapped for not complying (as many children were). I do think it is an interesting experiment for someone playing around with experimentation just for the fun of it and to get money. The thing some people here do not seem to realize, imo, is that she is setting up a world in order to get money and also to have something to do, but now she already has plenty of money, I assume, so she is doing it just to have something to do. This over-generalism and feeding it to others is a form of box tapping that I personally do not like to see, and I see through it, but, this aside, there must be some kind of truth in what she is saying or she couldn't have gotten away with what she is doing for so long, so back to the original quote:

What do you think? She surely did not come to this conclusion just because some children did not tap a box.

Littlebee, first of all I want to make it clear that my previous posts about magical thinking were not meant to be taken seriously.
It is not surprising that the typical children tapped on the box, because they have been imitating adults since they were born. It's an instinct that human babies do automatically without thinking about. Human infants copy facial expressions.
Autistic children often don't seem to have the instinct to do that.
One thing I find revealing about the experiment is that after she takes the boat out of the box, she shows the boat to the child and makes a comment about it before she puts it back in and closes the lid.
It's at that point that the boat becomes real and concrete to the autistic children. When she first mentioned there was a boat in the box and tapped on the box, it was all rather abstract.

As for Ute Frith's comments,
As I understand it, she was fascinated with autism and started he career because of a passionate interest to understand the autistic mind, and she has made a lot of important discoveries.
As for her comments made earlier in her career, they were impressions she got from what she observed and what was known at the time.
I have no problems with the comments.

Those observations seem fairly accurate to me. I believe she has since revised her thinking about empathy and realizes it is not a lack of empathy at all, but a failure of theory of mind.
I know I must have seemed like a monster who lacked empathy to my family when I was young.

I was going to say the same thing, there are no dates on those quotes.

No I'm sure she didn't come to that conclusion because some children did not tap a box. That had to do with social imitation or lack of it.
I can understand how she may have come to the conclusion about social impairment in the quote.
When I was young I didn't consider others or understand that my behavior could affect them. That could have been seen as egocentrism.
I learned how to be considerate when I was a young adult. I learned it on my own.
I still don't connect with other people, but I know I need to be considerate.

Seriously. I had a wide range of emotions when I read everything I could find on AS, trying to find something that didn't fit me. Sensory, social, special interests... it all fits too well to not be AS.

(P.S. - going in for a diagnosis this summer!! )

I was like Marybird when I was a kid. But the other thing is that we are often perceived as being unaware, etc, because we aren't showing "normal" physical body language of listening.

littlebee, I think you made some really interesting points about influence, etc. I've been trying to find the original study to see if they had any safeguards against that, but have been unable to so far.

I'm writing this from my phone so I'll try to be succinct. That autistic people are egocentric but not intentionally and not in a way that benefits them is an accurate observation. not understanding others' thoughts and feelings intuitively and being able to read their signals and an inability to have reciprocal relationships are expressions of this. Some autistic people do not even show awareness that other people exist.

It's not the same as saying autistic people are horrible. There are worse things to be than egocentric especially without craftiness/intent to manipulate others,which is what Frith describes.

I am interested in brain differences underlying autistic behaviors, and I hope that diagnosis will go in this direction in future, as objective tests are developed.

Autistic people can be seen as selfish and egocentric. I don't think it should be an insult, more like a fact as seen from the outside world. I've been selfish and egocentic in most of my life, and I think I continue to be one well in adulthood, but in a subtly different way. However, at times I feel (not only see) the need to be truely generous and do good to other people. It's more motivating when a win-win situation is in perspective, because this is what fits in with my (supposedly high) morals/policies.

Not imitating silly social behavior comes first, then lack of theory of mind, followed by an apparent egocentrism.

(I also write it - and most of my posts - on a phone.)

Good answer, and thanks for your entire message, but do you think all cases of autism are just a neurological disorder? Personally I do not believe that. Yes, the refrigerator mother concept is very over-simplistic, and I do think its application in France is unproductive and outdated, to put it mildly, but I would not be so quick to completely dispense with all facets of the idea that certain kinds of parenting in some ways can play into the development of some (and I think many) cases of autism, and personally I would not give her too much kudos for going in the direction she did. I suspect it is because she followed a trend and tendency that was developing, and I think it may actually be harmful to autistic people to think too much in this direction. From what I have seen, it does not lead to a balanced and nuanced approach at all. This response may not be popular, but I am speaking my truth as I understand it, and I thought about this for a long time before responding.