Oh Willard, I feel like I'm trying to make you hate me or something, even when I'm not.
The comment seems more about explaining their research than explaining than anything else. Their research supports the idea that simultaneously processing visual and audio can be hard for children with autism. That's what you should be taking away from this. And I think that that's perfectly cromulent (you get +10 points if you get the reference to that word) research. Although I question how useful that information was...doesn't the scientific community already know that sensory overload exists for people with autism?
But even then, we don't really get a good idea for the overall purpose of this study. For instance, it could be the first in a set of similar studies that allow for good baseline measures that can be compared to other upcoming studies that require data from this first one in order to be valid, or perhaps it's the first sort of study that will then be used in conjunction with an MRI and they again need a proper baseline measure and just to see that the study shows the results they'd expect.
Most importantly I think though, you're not actually reading the published study, but what some poor professor might have had to say off the top of their head in an interview they might not even have wanted. I don't have much experience in the academic world, but I've got enough to have heard plenty of professors get upset that the media doesn't properly represent their research, or that the people who are the liason to the public aren't themselves the brain behind the research, and that it's the media's fault for glossing over things and taking things out of context, or for forcing opinions and grasping at sentences they say so that the general public can easily 'get' it, even though that almost always means they're 'getting it' wrongly.
Not all psychological research should be done via introspection anyways. Most shouldn't be. If I were researching autism I would be basing my research off of what I've learned from individuals and from previous research done, but the research itself would probably not be introspective in nature, especially if I were to want to use any sort of imaging technique with it.
Besides which, maybe some autistic somewhere would describe it as this guy described it.
You're good people Willard though. I like you. Your rage makes sense no matter what I've prattled on about.
I have the same instances of rage against what I'm passionate about....like people still not f*****g knowing the debacle surrounding antidepressants and their efficacy and how it was largely 'work around' that got them deemed useful in the first place. And now everyone f*****g thinks there's useful drugs to help with depression when there really aren't. If they help its likely to be placebo.
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Not autistic, I think
Prone to depression
Have celiac disease
Poor motivation