Our goal today is to examine whether disruptions in social-cognitive functioning, such as those observed in autism, can sometimes be attributed, at least in part, to difficulties with the detection and processing of intentions/intentionality.

All of our readings consider the possibility that disruptions in intentional understanding occur in autism. Sacks' biographical sketch of Temple Grandin includes remarks suggestive of this idea, although this arises within the larger message that Temple Grandin lacks normal affective and empathic responses. Grandin says, for example, "The emotion circuit's not hooked up -- that's what's wrong" to explain her lack of emotional or aesthetic responses to other people, visual beauty, music, and the like. Interestingly, emotional responding to other mammals (e.g., cattle, pigs) remains intact. Sacks argues that Grandin's affect is especially disrupted with regard to "complex human experiences, social ones predominantly." With respect to intentions/intentionality specifically, Grandin believes that during early development she failed to naturally and spontaneously acquire implicit knowledge of social conventions and codes, and lacking this, was required instead to "'compute' others' intentions and states of mind, to try to make algorithmic, explicit, what for the rest of us is second nature." She believes that even little children comprehend other human beings in a way that is not open to her.

Some questions:
a) why mammals but not humans?
b) what is actually missing in intentional understanding in Grandin's case?
c) what hypotheses for research are engendered?

The article by Phillips, Baron-Cohen, & Rutter presents an explicit examination of some of these ideas. They suggest that normally developing children spontaneously seek gaze information in cases where others' intentions are ambiguous, and then consider the possibility that autistic children fail to use gaze information for this purpose. From the clinical literature they derived two actions that engender ambiguity regarding the actor's intentions: teasing (offering an object and then retracting it as the child starts to reach for it) and blocking (unexpectedly blocking the child's action on a toy). Three groups participated: normal infants of 9-18 months (mean age = 14.2 months), autistic children of 3-5 years (mean age = 53.3 months), and mentally handicapped children matched for mental and chronological age with the autistic group. In response to blocking and teasing actions, 100% of normal children made eye contact with the experimenter, while only 39% made eye contact in response to a control (unambiguous) action -- giving. Non-autistic mentally handicapped children made eye contact at relatively high rates to both teasing and blocking, but at low rates to giving. Autistic children, in contrast, made eye contact rarely in response to all three kinds of actions. Based on these findings, P, B-C, & R argue that normal children understand that people are goal-directed in their action, whereas autistic children are delayed or impaired in this ability.

Some questions:
a) appropriate controls?
b) appropriate interpretation of the findings?
c) implications?

The Carpenter and Bujak poster presents a failure to replicate the P, B-C, & R findings, and a different analysis of the locus of autistic children's deficits. They argue that autistic children fail to understand that others' intentions may not match the current state of affairs. They used Meltzoff's reenactment paradigm as their index of an understanding of "mismatched" intentions, a level of understanding they locate as on par with false belief understanding.

Some questions:
a) appropriate controls?
b) appropriate task analyses?
c) appropriate interpretation of the findings?
d) implications?

Sabbagh's manuscript focuses on the central role that intentional understanding plays in language processing and language development, and presents the argument that autism and right-hemisphere damage disrupt language because they impair some aspects of intentional understanding. His analysis has implications for developing a model of the neural systems that support intentional understanding.

Some questions:
a) what would supply more definitive evidence regarding 1) the intentional understanding/autism/RHD link, and 2) the neuro-physiological model?
b) any holes in the analysis?
c) any reason to question an "intentional understanding" SYSTEM?