The Clinical Neuropsychology of ASD
Neuropsychological research is crucial for understanding the challenges of ASD adults as the different information processing style they predominantly use is thought to result in both strengths and weaknesses in daily life tasks. In the current chapter we
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The Clinical Neuropsychology of ASD Hilde M. Geurts and Anne Geeke Lever
3.1
Clinical Neuropsychology: A Short Introduction
In daily life we are highly dependent on a wide range of cognitive skills, from attention to memory and from the ability to start behavior, to change behavior or to stop behavior, and to the ability to recognize emotions. We often use these skills without even realizing how crucial they are for communicating and interacting with others, for planning all kinds of aspects in your life in order to be able to reach future goals, and when driving a car or when trying to read a book and not letting your mind dwell to the other things you need to do. People with ASD are thought to have difficulties in various cognitive domains underlying the observed challenges they experience in daily life. The main goal of clinical neuropsychology is to use the knowledge regarding the relation between brain and behavior to understand the day-to-day challenges in clinical groups such as ASD. Hence, fundamental research focusing on brain development, brain mechanisms, and specific cognitive processes as well as clinical research focusing on cognitive profiles and the relationship with the observed (disorder specific) symptoms are of importance within the field of clinical neuropsychology. In this chapter, we focus primarily on clinical ASD research. When reading the current chapter, it is, however, good to keep in mind that clinical research and research focusing on neuroscience mutually influence each
H.M. Geurts (*) Dutch Autism and ADHD Research Center (d’Arc), Brain and Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Dr. Leo Kannerhuis, Mental Health Care Clinic for people with ASD, Doorwerth, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] A.G. Lever Dutch Autism and ADHD Research Center (d’Arc), Brain and Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 B. Barahona Corrêa, R.-J. van der Gaag (eds.), Autism Spectrum Disorders in Adults, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42713-3_3
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other and are largely intertwined. Some of the theories described below even originated from the observation that patients with specific brain lesions showed similar behaviors as children with ASD (e.g., Damasio and Maurer 1978; Maurer and Damasio 1982). So, even though we will not discuss the functional and structural imaging studies in support of the cognitive constructs related to ASD, the conclusions we draw based on the cognitive behavioral studies are in line with the findings discussed in Chap. 2.
3.2
Cognitive ASD Theories
There are three main cognitive theories of ASD, which are linked to the theoretical constructs of theory of mind, central coherence, and executive functioning (for a review, see Brunsdon and Happé 2014; Happé and Charlton 2012). Below, these three cognitive constructs will be discussed in more detail. However, recently, a number of researcher
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