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For more than a century, measurement experts have distinguished between time-limited tests and untimed power tests, which are administered without time limits or with time limits so generous that all students are assured of completing all items. On untimed power tests, students can differ in their propensity to correctly respond to every item, and items should differ in how many correct responses they elicit. However, differences among students’ speed of responding do not confound untimed power tests; therefore, untimed power tests ensure more accurate assessment. In this article, we present four empirically based reasons to administer untimed power tests rather than time-limited tests in educational settings. (1) Time-limited tests are less valid; students’ test-taking pace is not a valid reflection of their knowledge and mastery. (2) Time-limited tests are less reliable; estimates of time-limited tests’ reliability are artificially inflated due to artifactual consistency in students’ rate of work rather than authentic consistency in students’ level of knowledge. (3) Time-limited tests are less inclusive; time-limited tests exclude students with documented disabilities who, because they are legally allowed additional test-taking time, are often literally excluded from test-taking classrooms. (4) Time-limited tests are less equitable; in addition to excluding students with documented disabilities, time-limited tests can also impede students who are learning English, students from underrepresented backgrounds, students who are older than average, and students with disabilities who encounter barriers (e.g., stigma and financial expense) in obtaining disability documentation and legally mandated accommodations. We conclude by offering recommendations for avoiding time-limited testing in higher educational assessment.

We investigated whether autistic people are less prone to self-enhance (i.e., portray themselves in socially desirable ways). Autistic ( N = 130) and non-autistic ( N = 130) participants first responded to social desirability items using the standard instruction to endorse each item as true or false about themselves. Then, all participants read an explanation of what social desirability items measure before responding again to the social desirability items. Self-enhancement was operationalized as participants endorsing more social desirability items before learning the explanation than after. All participants endorsed significantly more social desirability items before learning the explanation than after, F subjects(1, 258) = 57.73, p < .001, [Formula: see text] = .183; F items(1, 34) = 43.04, p < .001, [Formula: see text] = .559). However, autistic and non-autistic participants did not significantly differ in how many items they endorsed, either before or after reading the explanation, indicating that autistic people are as susceptible to social desirability and self-enhancement as non-autistic people are. Our results challenge the claim that autistic people are immune to reputation management.

Purpose: Due to the developmental nature of autism, which is often diagnosed in preschool or elementary school-aged children, non-autistic parents of autistic children typically play a prominent role in autism advocacy. However, as autistic children become adults and adult diagnoses of autism continue to rise, autistic adults have played a more prominent role in advocacy. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the histories of adult and non-autistic parent advocacy in the United States and to examine the points of divergence and convergence. Approach: Because of their different perspectives and experiences, advocacy by autistic adults and non-autistic parents can have distinctive goals and conflicting priorities. Therefore, the approach we take in the current chapter is a collaboration between an autistic adult and a non-autistic parent, both of whom are research scholars. Findings: The authors explore the divergence of goals and discourse between autistic self-advocates and nonautistic parent advocates and offer three principles for building future alliances to bridge the divide between autistic adults and nonautistic parents. Implications: The chapter ends with optimism that US national priorities can bridge previous gulfs, creating space for autistic adult and non-autistic parent advocates to work together in establishing policies and practices that improve life for autistic people and their families and communities.

Implications: The chapter ends with optimism that US national priorities can bridge previous gulfs, creating space for autistic adult and non-autistic parent advocates to work together in establishing policies and practices that improve life for autistic people and their families and communities.

This article cautions instructors against administering tests that have time limits because time-limited tests are less valid, less reliable, less inclusive, and less equitable. Instead, instructors are encouraged to administer untimed power tests, which are tests without any time limits or with time limits so generous all students are assured of completing all items.

This article provides recommendations for writing empirical journal articles that enable transparency, reproducibility, clarity, and memorability. Recommendations for transparency include preregistering methods, hypotheses, and analyses; submitting registered reports; distinguishing confirmation from exploration; and showing your warts. Recommendations for reproducibility include documenting methods and results fully and cohesively, by taking advantage of open-science tools, and citing sources responsibly. Recommendations for clarity include writing short paragraphs, composed of short sentences; writing comprehensive abstracts; and seeking feedback from a naive audience. Recommendations for memorability include writing narratively; embracing the hourglass shape of empirical articles; beginning articles with a hook; and synthesizing, rather than Mad Libbing, previous literature.

Fast Mapping is a laboratory task that typically involves an experimenter creating a nonsense name for an object the participant has never seen before. We demonstrate how researchers’ use of the term Fast Mapping has extended beyond its core meaning as a laboratory task to more abstractly denote an internal process, a skill that children employ in their everyday lives, and an inherent capacity. We argue that such over-extension is problematic.

The claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind—that they fail to understand that other people have a mind or that they themselves have a mind—pervades psychology. This article (a) reviews empirical evidence that fails to support the claim that autistic people are uniquely impaired, much less that all autistic people are universally impaired, on theory-of-mind tasks; (b) highlights original findings that have failed to replicate; (c) documents multiple instances in which the various theory-of-mind tasks fail to relate to each other and fail to account for autistic traits, social interaction, and empathy; (c) summarizes a large body of data, collected by researchers working outside the theory-of-mind rubric, that fails to support assertions made by researchers working inside the theory-of-mind rubric; and (d) concludes that the claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind is empirically questionable and societally harmful., SCIENTIFIC ABSTRACT The assertion that autistic people lack a theory of mind—that they fail to understand that other people have a mind or that they themselves have a mind—pervades psychology. In this article, we critically examine the empirical basis of this assertion. We review empirical evidence that fails to support the claim that autistic people are uniquely impaired, much less that all autistic people are universally impaired, on theory-of-mind tasks. We highlight seminal theory-of-mind findings that have failed to replicate. We document multiple instances in which the various theory-of-mind tasks fail to converge and fail to predict autistic traits, social interaction, and empathy. We summarize a large body of data, collected by researchers working outside the theory-of-mind rubric, that fails to support assertions made by researchers working inside the theory-of-mind rubric. We conclude that the claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind is empirically questionable and societally harmful.

Contains fulltext : 214941.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository. 3 p.

Author(s): Aczel, Balazs; Szaszi, Barnabas; Sarafoglou, Alexandra; Kekecs, Zoltan; Kucharský, Simon; Benjamin, Daniel; Chambers, Christopher D; Fisher, Agneta; Gelman, Andrew; Gernsbacher, Morton A; Ioannidis, John P; Johnson, Eric; Jonas, Kai; Kousta, Stavroula; Lilienfeld, Scott O; Lindsay, D Stephen; Morey, Candice C; Munafo, Marcus; Newell, Benjamin R; Pashler, Harold; Shanks, David R; Simons, Daniel J; Wicherts, Jelte M; Albarracin, Dolores; Anderson, Nicole D; Antonakis, John; Arkes, Hal R; Back, Mitja D; Banks, George C; Beevers, Christopher; Bennett, Andrew A; Bleidorn, Wiebke; Boyer, Ty W; Cacciari, Cristina; Carter, Alice S; Cesario, Joseph; Clifton, Charles; Conroy, Ronan M; Cortese, Mike; Cosci, Fiammetta; Cowan, Nelson; Crawford, Jarret; Crone, Eveline A; Curtin, John; Engle, Randall; Farrell, Simon; Fearon, Pasco; Fichman, Mark; Frankenhuis, Willem; Freund, Alexandra M; Gaskell, M Gareth; Giner-Sorolla, Roger; Green, Don P; Greene, Robert L; Harlow, Lisa L; de la Guardia, Fernando Hoces; Isaacowitz, Derek; Kolodner, Janet; Lieberman, Debra; Logan, Gordon D; Mendes, Wendy B; Moersdorf, Lea; Nyhan, Brendan; Pollack, Jeffrey; Sullivan, Christopher; Vazire, Simine; Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan | Abstract: An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Zwaan et al. argue convincingly that replication needs to be more mainstream. Here, I suggest three practices for achieving that goal: Incremental Replications, which are built into each experiment in a series of experiments; Reciprocal Replications, which are reciprocal arrangements of co-replications across labs; and Didactic Replications, which are replications used for training.

Cognitive scientists are increasingly enthusiastic about research transparency. However, their enthusiasm could be tempered if the research reward system fails to acknowledge and compensate these efforts. This article suggests ways to reward greater research transparency during academic job searches, academic promotion and tenure evaluations, and society and national award selections.

Numerous style guides, including those issued by the American Psychological and the American Psychiatric Associations, prescribe that writers use only person-first language so that nouns referring to persons (e.g. children) always precede phrases referring to characteristics (e.g. children with typical development). Person-first language is based on the premise that everyone, regardless of whether they have a disability, is a person-first, and therefore everyone should be referred to with person-first language. However, my analysis of scholarly writing suggests that person-first language is used more frequently to refer to children with disabilities than to refer to children without disabilities; person-first language is more frequently used to refer to children with disabilities than adults with disabilities; and person-first language is most frequently used to refer to children with the most stigmatized disabilities. Therefore, the use of person-first language in scholarly writing may actually accentuate stigma rather than attenuate it. Recommendations are forwarded for language use that may reduce stigma.

The term “more appropriate communication” appears in more than 400 scholarly articles (according to Google Scholar). I examined the first 100 scholarly articles that pertained to communication between humans (rather than communication between computer networks). The question I sought to answer was who, according to the scholarly literature, bears responsibility for achieving “more appropriate communication?” Of the 100 scholarly articles examined, only a slim minority, N=7, imply that “more appropriate communication” is a responsibility shared among two or more communication partners, and most of these articles address “more appropriate communication” between literal peers, such as undergraduate students with other undergraduate students. The majority of scholarly articles, N=61, imply that the responsibility for “more appropriate communication” lies with the more powerful communication partners (i.e., people who have more status, experience, or resources). The remaining third of the scholarly articles (N=32) imply that responsibility for “more appropriate communication” lies with the less powerful communication partners, and these less powerful communication partners are frequently children with developmental disabilities. I conclude by suggesting that the responsibility for “more appropriate communication,” particularly with developmentally disabled children, either should be assumed by the more powerful communication partners or should be shared.

Numerous style guides, including those issued by the American Psychological and the American Psychiatric Associations, prescribe that writers use only person-first language so that nouns referring to persons (e.g. children) always precede phrases referring to characteristics (e.g. children with typical development). Person-first language is based on the premise that everyone, regardless of whether they have a disability, is a person-first, and therefore everyone should be referred to with person-first language. However, my analysis of scholarly writing suggests that person-first language is used more frequently to refer to children with disabilities than to refer to children without disabilities; person-first language is more frequently used to refer to children with disabilities than adults with disabilities; and person-first language is most frequently used to refer to children with the most stigmatized disabilities. Therefore, the use of person-first language in scholarly writing may actually accentuate stigma rather than attenuate it. Recommendations are forwarded for language use that may reduce stigma.

Google the question, “How is the Internet changing the way we communicate?,” and you will find no shortage of opinions, or fears, about the Internet altering the way we communicate. Although the Internet is not necessarily making communication briefer (neither is the Internet making communication less formal), the Internet is manifesting our preference for writing over speaking. I propose that our preference for communicating through Internet-based text derives from a fundamental feature of writing: In contrast to speech, which is most often synchronous, text is most often asynchronous.

Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos (children, adolescents, college students, and adults). More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video. Captions are particularly beneficial for persons watching videos in their non-native language, for children and adults learning to read, and for persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing. However, despite U.S. laws, which require captioning in most workplace and educational contexts, many video audiences and video creators are naïve about the legal mandate to caption, much less the empirical benefit of captions.

It’s become a caricature of autistic persons that they don’t understand figurative language. Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, three of the four contributions to this special issue endorse this stereotype without question. And all four contributions attribute this supposed deficit to even shakier fallacies, such as the controversial claim that autistic people lack empathy or a ‘theory of mind.’ In this commentary, we begin by reviewing the literature more exhaustively than the other contributions, and we highlight a point that they missed: Autistic persons are likely to have difficulty comprehending figurative language if they also have difficulty comprehending language in general. There doesn’t seem to be a specific deficit in figurative language unique to autism. We also tackle the claim that autistic people lack empathy. And we question the existence of a ‘theory of mind area,’ while demonstrating the pitfalls that ensnarl researchers when they strain to interpret differences between autistic and non-autistic brain activity as solely autistic deficits.

This study compared language development in 30-month-old toddlers on the autism spectrum and 25- month-old late talking toddlers without autism. Groups were matched on overall productive vocabulary (and non- verbal cognition was controlled) in order to compare lan- guage acquisition patterns related to vocabulary composition and early lexical-grammatical relationships. Findings revealed that semantic categories of words— including psychological state terms—used by toddlers on the autism spectrum were very similar to those of late talkers. Both groups were equivalent with respect to grammatical complexity and proportion of toddlers com- bining words, though late talkers displayed a relatively stronger association between lexical-grammatical abilities. These tentative findings are consistent with a dimensional account of early, core linguistic abilities across different populations of children with language delay.

Objective Twin and family studies of autistic traits and of cases diagnosed with autism suggest high heritability; however, the heritability of autistic traits in toddlers has not been investigated. Therefore, this study's goals were (1) to screen a statewide twin population using items similar to the six critical social and communication items widely used for autism screening in toddlers (Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers); (2) to assess the endorsement rates of these items in a general population; and (3) to determine their heritability. Method Participants composed a statewide, unselected twin population. Screening items were administered to mothers of 1,211 pairs of twins between 2 and 3 years of age. Twin similarity was calculated via concordance rates and tetrachoric and intraclass correlations, and the contribution of genetic and environmental factors was estimated with single-threshold ordinal models. Results The population-based twin sample generated endorsement rates on the analogs of the six critical items similar to those reported by the scale's authors, which they used to determine an autism threshold. Current twin similarity and model-fitting analyses also used this threshold. Casewise concordance rates for monozygotic (43%) and dizygotic (20%) twins suggested moderate heritability of these early autism indicators in the general population. Variance component estimates from model-fitting also suggested moderate heritability of categorical scores. Conclusions Autism screener scores are moderately heritable in 2- to 3-year-old twin children from a population-based twin panel. Inferences about sex differences are limited by the scarcity of females who scored above the threshold on the toddler-age screener.

A great deal of recent research has focused on the role of gaze in the development of infants' social understanding (e.g., Flom, Lee, & Muir, 2007). Gaze probably plays a significant role in the social and social-cognitive development of Western, middle-class, typically developing, sighted infants. However, studies of other communities and of infants developing atypically suggest that other behaviors may play a similar role. In this article, we call attention to neglected aspects of infants' sensory experience that most likely also contribute to their social and social-cognitive development. We also explore the possibility that for some infants, these other modalities may be paramount. We organize our review around three gaze-based behaviors—mutual gaze, gaze following, and gaze alternation—each of which has been used to assess or represent an important construct in social or social-cognitive development. Mutual gaze is used as an indicator of social engagement, gaze following is believed to index understanding of others' attention or intentions, and gaze alternation (between an object and a caregiver) is used to assess joint attention between infant and caregiver. For each of these behaviors, we begin by describing the role it is assumed to play in typically developing infants in Western societies. We then examine the use of the behavior in atypical development and in non-Western cultures. We consider whether nongaze behaviors may serve the same function; for example, in communities in which mutual gaze is less frequent than in the Western middle-class context, continuous physical contact between infant and caregiver may serve the function of engagement. We conclude by recommending that researchers pay attention to mechanisms other than gaze, as these other mechanisms probably play an important role in the social-cognitive development of all infants.

Burack and Russo (2008) applaud our approach to understanding autistics’ atypical joint attention (Gernsbacher, Stevenson, Khandakar, & Goldsmith, 2008) but express some concerns about the evidence we drew upon to support our thesis. In response, we underscore the empirical nuance of our thesis—that autistics’ atypical manifestations of joint attention arise from their atypical resistance to distraction, atypical parallel perception, and atypical execution of volitional actions. We recap how our hypothesis derives from fresh interpretations, well-replicated findings, and underlying mechanisms.

Autistics are presumed to be characterized by cognitive impairment, and their cognitive strengths (e.g., in Block Design performance) are frequently interpreted as low-level by-products of high-level deficits, not as direct manifestations of intelligence. Recent attempts to identify the neuroanatomical and neurofunctional signature of autism have been positioned on this universal, but untested, assumption. We therefore assessed a broad sample of 38 autistic children on the preeminent test of fluid intelligence, Raven's Progressive Matrices. Their scores were, on average, 30 percentile points, and in some cases more than 70 percentile points, higher than their scores on the Wechsler scales of intelligence. Typically developing control children showed no such discrepancy, and a similar contrast was observed when a sample of autistic adults was compared with a sample of nonautistic adults. We conclude that intelligence has been underestimated in autistics.

Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction, interests or body movements, and communication. Our review examines the empirical status of three communication phenomena believed to be unique to autism: pronoun reversal (using the pronoun you when the pronoun I is intended, and vice versa), echolalia (repeating what someone has said), and a reduced or even reversed production-comprehension lag (a reduction or reversal of the well-established finding that speakers produce less sophisticated language than they can comprehend). Each of these three phenomena has been claimed to be unique to autism; therefore, each has been proposed to be diagnostic of autism, and each has been interpreted in autism-centric ways (psychoanalytic interpretations of pronoun reversal, behaviorist interpretations of echolalia, and clinical lore about the production-comprehension lag). However, as our review demonstrates, none of these three phenomena is in fact unique to autism; none can or should serve as diagnostic of autism, and all call into question unwarranted assumptions about autistic persons and their language development and use.

Implicit causality might enable readers to focus on the imputed cause of an event and make it the default referent of a following pronoun. Alternatively, its effects might arise only when a following explicit cause is integrated with a description of the event. In three probe recognition experiments, in which the participants in the events were of the same sex, the only reliable effect—apart from the advantage of first mention—was that of whether implicit and explicit causes were the same. This effect was independent of whether the probe named the referent of the pronoun. In a fourth experiment, in which the two participants were of different sexes, there was no simple effect of implicit causality, but there was an advantage for the pronoun's referent. These results are consistent with the view that implicit causality has its effects at integration. We discuss their broader implications for theories of comprehension.

Some adults and children exhibit defensive behaviors to tactile or auditory stimulation. These symptoms occur not only in subsets of children with ADHD, autism, and Fragile X syndrome, but also in the apparent absence of accompanying disorders. Relatively little research explores the correlates and antecedents of sensory defensiveness. Using a population-based sample of 1,394 toddler-aged twins, mothers reported on tactile and auditory defensiveness, temperament, and behavior problems. The incidence of defensive symptoms was widely distributed, with some accumulation of cases in the extreme range. Girls were overrepresented in the extreme tactile defensiveness group. Both auditory and tactile defensiveness were modestly associated with fearful temperament and anxiety, but they were relatively distinct from other common dimensions of childhood behavioral dysfunction. Twin correlations for the full range of scores and concordance rates for the extremes suggested moderate genetic influences, with some indication that the tactile domain might be more heritable than the auditory domain.

Diminished gaze fixation is one of the core features of autism and has been proposed to be associated with abnormalities in the neural circuitry of affect. We tested this hypothesis in two separate studies using eye tracking while measuring functional brain activity during facial discrimination tasks in individuals with autism and in typically developing individuals. Activation in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala was strongly and positively correlated with the time spent fixating the eyes in the autistic group in both studies, suggesting that diminished gaze fixation may account for the fusiform hypoactivation to faces commonly reported in autism. In addition, variation in eye fixation within autistic individuals was strongly and positively associated with amygdala activation across both studies, suggesting a heightened emotional response associated with gaze fixation in autism.

Using Korean, we investigated how syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors influence the representation of a sentence, in particular, the relative accessibility of different components of a sentence representation. In six experiments, participants performed a probe recognition task after reading each of a series of sentences. We manipulated the rate at which each word of the sentence was presented (250 and 500 ms) and the interval between the sentence-final word and the probe-recognition test word (immediate, 500 ms delay, and 1000 ms delay). We also manipulated the syntactic position (subject versus object), semantic role (agent versus patient), and order of mention (first- versus second-mentioned participant) of the probed item. Pragmatic factors (the order of mention) strongly influenced accessibility immediately and through the longest delay, whereas syntactic and semantic factors had little effect.

It is frequently believed that autism is characterized by a lack of social or emotional reciprocity. In this article, I question that assumption by demonstrating how many professionals—researchers and clinicians—and likewise many parents, have neglected the true meaning of reciprocity. Reciprocity is “a relation of mutual dependence or action or influence,” or “a mode of exchange in which transactions take place between individuals who are symmetrically placed.” Assumptions by clinicians and researchers suggest that they have forgotten that reciprocity needs to be mutual and symmetrical—that reciprocity is a two-way street. Research is reviewed to illustrate that when professionals, peers, and parents are taught to act reciprocally, autistic children become more responsive. In one randomized clinical trial of “reciprocity training” to parents, their autistic children's language developed rapidly and their social engagement increased markedly. Other demonstrations of how parents and professionals can increase their behavior of reciprocity are provided.

Amid ongoing public speculation about the reasons for sex differences in careers in science and mathematics, we present a consensus statement that is based on the best available scientific evidence. Sex differences in science and math achievement and ability are smaller for the mid-range of the abilities distribution than they are for those with the highest levels of achievement and ability. Males are more variable on most measures of quantitative and visuospatial ability, which necessarily results in more males at both high- and low-ability extremes; the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive. Successful careers in math and science require many types of cognitive abilities. Females tend to excel in verbal abilities, with large differences between females and males found when assessments include writing samples. High-level achievement in science and math requires the ability to communicate effectively and comprehend abstract ideas, so the female advantage in writing should be helpful in all academic domains. Males outperform females on most measures of visuospatial abilities, which have been implicated as contributing to sex differences on standardized exams in mathematics and science. An evolutionary account of sex differences in mathematics and science supports the conclusion that, although sex differences in math and science performance have not directly evolved, they could be indirectly related to differences in interests and specific brain and cognitive systems. We review the brain basis for sex differences in science and mathematics, describe consistent effects, and identify numerous possible correlates. Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular. A wide range of sociocultural forces contribute to sex differences in mathematics and science achievement and ability—including the effects of family, neighborhood, peer, and school influences; training and experience; and cultural practices. We conclude that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways. There are no single or simple answers to the complex questions about sex differences in science and mathematics.

Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers’ access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced (producing a “benefit”) when the character is rementioned; the first experiment also investigated whether readers’ access to the main character in a narrative becomes weakened or interfered with (producing a “cost”) when a new character is introduced. The purpose of the second experiment was to ensure that there was nothing unusually salient about the accessibility of names; thus, we assessed readers’ access to an object associated with the main character rather than the character’s name. Again, readers demonstrated increased accessibility to the main character when it was rementioned in the narrative, and readers demonstrated reduced accessibility to the main character when a new character was introduced. A third experiment compared more-skilled and less-skilled readers’ abilities to manage these mental representations during narrative comprehension. Findings were consistent with research suggesting that more-skilled readers are more skilled at attenuating interfering information (i.e., suppression). Data from all 3 experiments suggest that successful narrative comprehension involves managing mental representations of salient and often times interfering characters.

This paper reports three experiments on the interpretation of “conceptual” anaphors. These are anaphors that do not have an explicit linguistic antecedent, but one constructed from context. For instance, if one says “I need a knife. Where do you keep them?”, them means something like “the knives that I presume you have in your house”. In the first experiment, subjects rated sentences containing conceptual anaphors, of three different types, to be as natural as ones with a “linguistically correct” antecedent (e.g. “I need an iron. Where do you keep it?”), and as more natural than ones with neither a plausible conceptual antecedent nor a plausible linguistic one. In a second (self-paced) experiment, subjects judged whether the second sentence in such pairs was a sensible continuation from the first, and the time to make these judgements was measured. We found that acceptability judgements were high, and judgement times low, in just those sentences that were rated as more natural in the first experiment. These first two experiments showed that conceptual anaphors are quite easily understood. However, they did not show that such anaphors are processed without difficulty. In the third experiment, we therefore compared conceptual anaphors (“plate … them”) with matched plural anaphors whose antecedents were explicit (“some plates … them”). The results were different for different types of anaphor: in one case (pronouns that referred to collective sets), the conceptual version followed by a plural pronoun was easier than the explicit plural version. For the other two types (references to generics and to implied multiple items), the explicit plurals were understood more rapidly than their conceptual counterparts.

We propose that reading stories, such as a narrative about a character who takes money from a store where his best friend works and who later learns that his best friend has been fired, stimulates readers to activate the knowledge of how the character feels when he finds out that his best friend has been fired from a job for something he did. In other words, we propose that readers infer fictional character’s emotional states. In this article, we first review two series of laboratory experiments (Gernsbacher, Goldsmith, & Robertson, 1992; Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1992) that empirically tested this hypothesis by measuring participants’ reading times to target sentences that contained emotion words that matched (e.g., guilt) or mismatched (e.g., pride) the implied emotional state. We then present a third series of laboratory experiments that tested how automatically such knowledge is activated by using a divided-attention task (tone-identification, per-sentence memory load, or cumulative memory load) and by comparing target-sentence reading time when the emotional state is explicitly mentioned versus only implicit.

When members of the public envision the disability of autism, they most likely envision a child, rather than an adult. In this empirically based essay, three authors, one of whom is an autistic self-advocate, analyzed the role played by parents, charitable organizations, the popular media, and the news industry in infantilizing autism. Parents portrayed the face of autism to be that of a child 95% of the time on the homepages of regional and local support organizations. Nine of the top 12 autism charitable organizations restricted descriptions of autism to child-referential discourse. Characters depicted as autistic were children in 90% of fictional books and 68% of narrative films and television programs. The news industry featured autistic children four times as often as they featured autistic adults in contemporary news articles. The cyclical interaction between parent-driven autism societies, autism fundraising charities, popular media, and contemporary news silences adult self-advocates by denying their very existence. Society's overwhelming proclivity for depicting autism as a disability of childhood poses a formidable barrier to the dignity and well-being of autistic people of all ages.