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Autistic children at play: injecting fun into research and clinical paradigms

The importance of serial behaviour is paramount at every level of normal functioning. McGonigle & colleagues consider it a core adaptive competence and invested a considerable effort in developing executive and ordering-based paradigms which operate well beyond the scope of simple choice procedures. Using essentially non-verbal tasks, implemented with touch screens and designed to minimise motor demands, these paradigms comprise a menu of fully supervised, semi supervised, self organised seriation procedures which have secured unique evidence for hierarchical executive control in children and monkeys alike and are also considered a generic competence in the evolution and development of language. Applied to the pathology of cognition, these tests have also proved sensitive in the domains of degenerative diseases, and in providing both qualitative and quantitative assesments of derailments of cognitive growth, as in Fra-X syndrome. Whilst the programme has evolved a common currency of test and measurement over a range of species, it has been necessary, of course, to implement core tests suitable for the subjects of the investigation. In the case of monkeys, tests of progressive difficulty have been the norm in the context of supervised/semi-supervised investigations where the behaviour is reinforced by a peanut dispensed at the end of a successful serial production. The tasks themselves also seemed intrinsically motivating for simians.