Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from?

The “jellyfish” study (2011) was influential in this, as it concluded that autistic people lacked Theory of Mind & capacity for moral reasoning.

medicalxpress.com/news/2011-01…

In the fictional scenario given to participants, Janet tells a friend it’s safe to swim with jellyfish. She believes they’re harmless. The friend is stung and dies.

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#Autism #Empathy #Neurodiversity #Psychology #TheoryofMind #ActuallyAutistic

Neuroscientists find evidence that autistic patients have trouble understanding others' intentions

(PhysOrg.com) -- A study from MIT neuroscientists reveals that high-functioning autistic adults appear to have trouble using theory of mind to make moral judgments in certain situations.

^{Anne Trafton (Medical Xpress)}

I think you would be interested in a book that came recently to mind: Anne Wilson Schaef's When Society Becomes an Adddict.

I read it shortly after it was published in 1988, and at the time it was eye-opening about the problems in the company in which I worked. But in rereading it now, it has a much broader reach.

Here are inexpensive copies:

abebooks.com/servlet/SearchRes…

#book #psychology #sociology #society #culture #addiction

A post-migration re-#introduction!

I’m currently a postdoc in Marlene Behrmann’s lab at Carnegie Mellon. I’m broadly interested in understanding the #psychology and #neuroscience underlying the #development of cognitive abilities such as categorization.

Recently I’ve been exploring the broader biological network that may support may object categorization (e.g., doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09…) and the #computational processes that may support few-shot categorization in infancy (e.g., doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74943)

Perception of an object’s global shape is best described by a model of skeletal structure in human infants

Six- to twelve-month old infants, who have little linguistic or object experience, classify objects by relying on a invariant representation of global shape known as the shape skeleton.

^{Vladislav Ayzenberg (eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd)}