YouSaid · the spoken record

Michelle Dawson

lines on the record: 61
first: 2018-08-01
most recent: 2018-08-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I had to, so it came out of my situation being terrible. Say I was quite motivated. I started by, I had been told over and over again that I was too stupid and no other way to put it to understand autism research. I tried other avenues. I was in very difficult situation, everything, and really, because I had to address these legal issues and questions, I did actually look at the autism literature and suddenly I had information I could really work with. Suddenly, there it was, you know, this information that I was supposed to be too stupid to work with. And I can tell you that view continues onwards that I'm still too stupid to work with the literature. But what I found is that the information I really needed was in this paper's. So I read a lot, a lot of papers. I read a lot of papers.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gay individuals is having human rights and the benefit and protection of basic standards in science and ethics. I think that's what autistics are missing, not identity politics.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my goodness So no why not and I'm not even sure I don't you know keep in mind I think that what well first off I'm going to say what happened gay individual what helped”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Improve your chances greatly and make you sort of in a much less precarious situation. And we are more and more sort of, and yes, it is a pharma segregation, of saying, yes, this is what we should do to get autistics employed. Now, it's very hard to argue against that in the current situation.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Umbrella of these sort of, you know, we will test these autistics, we will make sure, you know, we will sort of hire them out to firms, we will get the firms used to having autistics around, we will coach people through things and so on. And this allows autistics to be in the workforce in a much less precarious way than they would if they simply went out in the world and then had to face this sort of problem of being denied basic rights and standards, which is just a very precarious situation. You may be lucky, but you would have to know it's only luck, no matter how hard you work, no matter how good your work is, your situation is very precarious. Whereas if you're sort of under them, you know, I'm trying to think of the right term, you're sort of almost endorsed. You're an endorsed autistic or you have this sort of stamp of approval. And that sort of indicates to the employer that they should treat you in a certain way. So that will...”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're autistic and you want to be in the workforce in a way that is not very potentially harmful to you, you would be wise to seek out enterprises like this because they are, they shouldn't, so first off, obviously they shouldn't be necessary. Obviously, autistics should be able to go into the workforce like everybody else, be respected for their abilities, not be discriminated against due to their job unrelated atypicalities job irrelevant atypicalities that is not the case. So you have autistic people who as employees are being very much underappreciated and undervalued, and so you have these organizations. And it's sort of, it's very, it's sort of massive. You have these huge efforts to get autistics implied under the sort of”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“for granted where the exception is that you'll be denied these standards and if you are there will be recourse in autism that is not the case so to me that is a segregation I can't speak to the other diagnoses I haven't found I've looked very hard and have not found a situation like you have an autism where you have these unacceptably low standards that are sort of universally advocated for and that there is no advocacy in the other direction and you have the influence of advocacy is just completely determinative.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just a bias, but I have a profound segregation deficit. And anybody who's tried to segregate me has going to run into that. So if you try to segregate me, I'm not going to go there. So it should not be segregation. DSM should not be segregation. DSM 5 autism DSM autism is segregation. Why? Because the diagnosis segregates autistic people into lower standards of science and ethics than would be acceptable for anybody else. That's what your diagnosis does. Now, you may be lucky anyway. You may encounter extraordinary individuals who know you're autistic and who will apply good standards of science and ethics to you. That certainly happens, but you must be lucky. It will not be the kind of more taken.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most Sure, but you can't extrapolate from that to parents in general. You just absolutely can't. The literature is different from what you get from the very loud advocates. And of course, you have a lot of autistic parents of autistic offspring, still very poorly studied, but this definitely happens. The reproductive fitness, as they call it, of autistics has been wildly underestimated, I think. This is again my own views and non-genetics person. So you have that. But I think you have to be very careful not to confuse advocacy and autism with any group in particular like parents or autistics for that matter, their views. I think that's a real problem. Now, the segregation thing, I have a massive bias against segregation. See, this may be one place where I'm as an autistic. See, I have an absolute”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing I'm going to totally disagree about the parents, keep in mind in autism how very, very loud people, loud advocates, loud influential advocates. That does not mean, and those are autistics and non-autistics, professional organizations, people selling services, whatever, very loud advocates. They are not necessarily representative.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've ever heard, probably, and so on. I don't think that those things are being taken seriously enough. We definitely are getting data from autistic people who are diagnosed as adults who seem to be better off than what you find in longitudinal studies of autistics who are diagnosed with children. All very, very hard to interpret, but the question is raised. And the fact that it is out there, and I'm not saying trying to discourage or encourage anything or give advice in the least, but it speaks to, I think my own concerns, and maybe they've been futile, but about standards, basic standards in research and practice, standards of science ethics in medicine. These are things I see as human rights issues. They are, to me, a big deal, and we should be very concerned that we are doing things to autistic people.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is possible just like it is possible. Again, very hard idea to test, and it's one that I wouldn't even think that I would ever say, but I've said it, and I've even presented about it, is asking whether an autism diagnosis is more beneficial than harmful. Very hard question to investigate. People have actually, when there is an actual purpose-built study that does that in a way that is obviously has a lot of flaws, but found that the probable autistics who weren't diagnosed were better off. And in population-based studies, like the one in Korea, the autistics who had not been diagnosed did not have an existing diagnosis, were much better off. You often find that autistics who are diagnosed older at older rather than earlier ages are better off, is the contrary.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, autism has not become more prevalent. There is no reason to believe that it has. And the idea that it has become more prevalent has been sort of very destructive for us in research and to actual autistic people since the premise really what you're saying when you say that there's been a large increase in autism prevalence, that you are saying older autistics don't exist. That means we can't learn anything from them, you know, including from their early development, from their outcomes, from their achievements. We just sort of totally erase them and write them off.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“views that if you have a rare variant, that doesn't mean you don't also have common variants that contribute to how atypically your mind works. So it's been this sort of long slog, but it is a cautionary note against the sort of any simplistic explanation for autistic genetics. And I think we have real problems in there's been some progress, but I do think we have real problems in where we've looked, how we've looked. Some of that mirrors just what has happened generally in genetics.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying autistics will be quite different from each other in because those are two different issues. So how autistics process information and the sort of genetics that may lead to brains that work like autistic brains. So I'm not a genetics person, so I do cognitive stuff. But I think the genetic stuff is really a cautionary note of leaping to conclusions that, for instance, you have these sort of rare de novo variants that are the real big deal. And even looking for them in the most favorable circumstance possible, that is you're looking in families that only have one autistic person, they did not find much. But that was the sort of leading story for a long time. We are now the seesaw is sort of back to common variants and we are getting slightly more complicated.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should be less hasty in deciding things about autistic genetics. I mean, I think that's the main message. You know, we're doing the seesaw between we had, you know, the de nova story was just very, you know, the de novo rare variant story was just a very big deal so that you have an entire collection, you have the Simon Simplex collection, which is just really designed to find these which were assumed to, you know, if we find these, you know, we will crack autism genetics.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do with information that will make them more similar in what they do with information and that will give them much more in common. Autistics do not have that which makes them not just different from typical people but quite different from each other. This is, I think, being slightly recognized now that autistic people may be more idiosyncratics. This is where it is popped into the literature.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're an easy this verily striking in the literature and I've just been really, you can see this in the whole predictive processing literature where there is sort of one optimal way to process everything, which is amazing. This is how, you know, supposing you not only, you know, within one person, but across the entire population, you know, there's the premise that there is sort of this optimal predictive inference. that there is one optimal way to process everything. So if you have a hierarchy of information processing that is similar across typical people, and I do believe you have that. I mean, there is some variation, but the hierarchy works in about the same way. So you would get much more similarity. I mean, it doesn't mean that everyone's similar. They're brought up in different places. They have different experiences. They have different genetics. They have different on and on. But they have that greater similarity in what...”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was autonomous from categorization. In the typical population, even when it wasn't useful, they formed categories. They had to. So there you had these non-optional categories. They formed categories even when it produced biases, even when it wasn't useful for the task. They had to. They had no choice. In the autistics, it was optional. The processes were more autonomous. I've also called this cognitive versatility. It doesn't mean that, you know, again, it doesn't mean that autistics can't do this. It doesn't mean that they can't do what might be thought of as top-down processing, what might be thought of as using prior's, or what might be thought of as predictive processing or whatever. It's not that they can't do it. It's that it is not so mandatory or automatic. It is more optional and more versatile.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“one from another, you know, is this tell them apart? They did not show a discrimination peak. That is to say, they were not biased by the category boundary. I sort of leapt in on this because this was considered to be a deficit in category formation. And, you know, I said you can't say that because the autistics, when you ask them to form categories, formed typical categories. You can't form more typical categories than that. The classification curve was identical. Then you asked them to discriminate. They performed that task. That doesn't mean that they forgot how to categorize. It means that the categorization, they didn't have that bias was not useful in performing the discrimination task accurately. There came the idea of autonomy. So this means that discrimination was autonomous in the audience.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Greater than those who are both on one side and both on the other. The difference between the two is actually the same, but because there has been this sort of division into two different categories. So this is called a discrimination peak, and you'll notice that because it's found in the typical population, it's not considered a deficit or a bias, it's considered a peak, something good. So the question was, do autistics have this peak? And so they were asked to do two things, classify these ellipses, which is in effect categorize them. So can they categorize these ellipses as wide or skinny? You can look and see whether they're doing this. And then do they produce a discrimination peak? So the autistics produce this completely typical classification curve. So they formed typical categories when this was the task. But when they're asked to describe”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, how do I answer that? So this first came out of, you know, these things don't happen in the proper order if you look at the literature. So this came out of actually a lovely study done by Isabel Suliero, who is a PhD student at the time. And she was looking at categorization of her field as categorization. And she was looking at how autistic people categorize ellipses. And the interesting thing about categories is that they distort perception. People will believe that things will form a category boundary. Let's say Yellips versus skinny ellipses and where they put the boundary will mean that they sort of distort how they see those things that are just one slide or the other, that boundary, even though the difference isn't any.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's my hypothesis, the optionality anyway, so that's me. So maybe not the person you should ask. No, you are the person I should ask.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very important and requires all these abilities that autistic supposedly don't have. And I thought, well, isn't this worth pursuing? And it did take a lot of persuasion to go in that direction to sort of question the commonplace and typical, and this is typical of the autism literature. Autistics perform well on the test, there must be something wrong with the test.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a paper in 2004 and it was when I sort of, one of the first ones I actually kind of looked at in an editing capacity after was sort of accepted provisionally. It did find a very tentatively that autistics were possibly performing better on RAVE than these other tests. And the interpretation in the paper is that Raven wasn't a good test for autistics. It must overestimate autistic intelligence. And I thought first that there are other possibilities. And also, I looked around at how Raven was being, first off, I had to look at what Raven was and how it was being interpreted in the autism literature, which is that when autistic performed well on it, it was very, it was almost denigrated as a test. This was just visospatial abilities and so on. And you look in the intelligence literature and you have this test that is really central in defining human intelligence.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assume that autistics have in processing complex information, in executive functioning, in working memory, in all kinds of complex processes. This is what Raven actually demands.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Autistics do better on Raven and quite a bit better. In some individuals, the discrepancy is spectacular. It's a lot. So how they would be judged, and again, go to the Savant literature, and this is what influenced me to pursue this. You'll have an individual in the Savant literature who really cannot perform other tests, would be judged as very intellectually disabled on other tests. Effectively doesn't even have, can't reform receptive language tests much less produce language, and score is very high on Raven. So one possibility, I mean, better than most of the typical population, all, but one or two percent. So, you know, and again, he had to have the opportunity to do that for us to find that out. So there's a lot of interesting things about that because if you look at what the kinds of deficits that have been”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a matrix of entries. So the number varies. And you have the last one in the matrix, the last item in the matrix is missing. And you choose the right one from an array of offered answers. So that's it. It sounds too simple or easy, but it is a very complex test. and a very difficult one. In effect, it's played a large role in defining what general intelligence is.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are very different approaches to measuring intelligence. One is a battery of tests, as in Wexler scales of intelligence. You are trying to get at general abilities by using an array of different specific tasks. So you're trying to get at something latent. So these are just specific abilities, but through those that you come up with some kind of latent general ability that we call intelligence or a full-scale intelligence, or you can take one specific one test with one format that is sufficiently complex and difficult that it gets at the same thing, just with one test. So that would be Raven's progressive matrices, a test that has been extremely influential in the entire intelligence literature.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that's very well established, though it is not interpreted that way. So the way to interpret it is that autistics do not organize information in memory typically. This should not surprise anybody. They do not use narratives to edit things, to organize things. And that means that they perform very differently on episodic memory tasks. And in related tests that require people to organize information into sort of common or popular narratives.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're just exploring specific aspects of their extraordinary music ability. You know, you will only mention in passing that there are an outstanding chess player. And we don't know anything more about that. So that's just an example that is actually in the literature.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“since a particularly good array of information for artistics is generally savant's tent they are not of the musicians aren't all pianists but an awful lot of them are and the piano all the information is there right it's the it's in front of you it's it's complex it's all there so this tends to be the kinds of information that autistics will start with now let's say you have somebody and they figure out they figure out music you know they figure it out at all levels you know from a single note to complex compositions and this is what savants do what if they realize then and it's in their environment that they can apply this to something else and you do get savants that have multiple abilities that used to be considered wrongly not what happened but it is what happens and the idea of an autistic polymath has just not been explored at all so you get a paper where the autistic person you're”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They try, so they do now since this is taking that information away is a feature of many, if not most, popular autism interventions, so that's awful. So I'm answering the question, why are some people consider savants and some not? First, we don't know anything. We are not interested in what kinds of information artists have available to them starting development. So I'm trying to get other people interested in that. It's very uphill. You know, because artistics are maybe specific on how they start to figure out how to work with the Kinds, quantities, and arrangements of information they process well. So let's say an autistic will have access to, say, music and they will have access to good music and so on. And they will figure that out and they have access to piano, which is particularly...”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to answer that. I'm going to totally answer a different question, which is that what people should notice, first off, is that savant skills are sort of conglomerated in specific areas. Why might that be music, hyperlexia, drawing in three dimensions calculation, calendar calculation? Why? Because this is information that tends to be available in most environments and that is often quite hard to take out of those environments. Now you have to think about that.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, exactly, but you know what they said in this, what the researchers here didn't anticipate, and it's just sort of awful that this isn't reported in a formal paper. This is in a book chapter, but that it didn't occur to them that they would run out of fingers. And he could still disembed it. And they had not anticipated that they would need someone with more than 10 fingers to properly test the limits of this autistic person's ability. So this is somebody who is a creative, fantastic musician in every sense. But to know that he can do this, I mean, it's almost like almost by accident that we know this, and we have not managed to get to the limit of his abilities here because they just didn't anticipate.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better at disaggregating chords, core disembeddings than Pamela Heaton did work in this area. And my favorite bit in this literature is in book chapter by Linda Pring, where they tested Derek Paravicini, so he is blind and autistic. Outstanding musician is considered intellectually disabled, developmentally disabled, however you want to put it. As they do in the Savant literature, they test these savants against people who are experts, so expert musicians. And conk out pretty quick after five or six notes. They're getting in a lot of trouble. They can't disembed these chords. They can't tell you which notes. They consist of. And Derek Parvacini kept going.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very obvious that they are processing information atypically. That makes them very obvious autistics. They are very obviously high variants in their range of abilities. So there can be quite drastic contrast between things that they are bad at and things that they are excellent at. And this, again, makes some very, very obvious people their abilities are extraordinary for anybody. They have difficulty doing quite basic things. So they're very obvious. They've been extremely important in research in spite of the literature on them being tiny. It's disproportionately contributed to what we know. Yet, you know, this extraordinary contribution of these individuals has just been really, gets denigrated all the time. That's awful to see. This is how we know because autistic savants can disaggregate cords. This is then studied in less obviously talented autistics who, it turns out, are”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So autistics are good at card disembedding, and that's what that ability is called. Now, this is a great way to bring in the importance of the literature on autistic savants. Autistic savants are the best way to think of them. It is autistics who are very obvious.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In real life. Autistics are maybe because their experiences are quite complex with how people respond to them starting early in life. And I'm just wildly speculating here. But autistics are going to notice that things are more complex and uncertain than that. And again, it's the considering more possibilities. And that will very much hamper their task performance if what you're looking for is this sort of automatic certainty that these active expressions are sort of all there is, which is not accurate. And that leads to many problems because we're actually training autistic people to ignore the complex, real, important information in favor of the cricketered stereotyped simplified, probably wrong information, and we should really think about that. But that gives you an idea of looking at social”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literature. And for example, the MIT, their affective Petting Group, Rosalind Picard, these fantastic studies showing that people smile in frustration, and those are real honesty goodness, Eckman-type smiles. You know, you have the whole facial action coding thing going on, those are real, genuine smiles that people smile in frustration when they're genuinely frustrated. They don't do it when they're acting out frustration. And there are many other examples like that. People smile for many different reasons. They may, and that is acknowledged to some degree in the literature and the typical population, not in the autism literature where things are supposed to are completely simple. They're just very caricatured and cartoonish. Now, what you find is that the typical population can decipher their way through this. They know what these facial expressions are supposed to represent, even if they don't look like that.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A huge literature in autism about how autism judge facial expressions of emotion in other people. What you have in the autism literature is you haven't only just turned autistic people into sort of stereotypes and cartoons, you've done that to the typical population. This is really at odds with the non-autism literature on facial expressions, which is much more complicated. In the autism literature, it's assumed that you can just read people's inner emotions and mental states which aren't mental states are not necessarily well defined, that it's sort of a simple matter that it is sort of written all over somebody's face. Or even you can read it just from looking at a photo of their eyes. And things are far more complicated than that in the literature, in the non-automatic literature.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will only go so far. You know, they are not going to lose that possibly important information that these are just triangles and this might, you know, that you would think that this would be quite reasonably produce a bit of caution in assuming that you know quite a lot about their profound mental states.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which autistics can do, you must attribute mental states to them, profound mental states, like they're jealous or they're flirting. And autistics are very bad at this task. And this has been replicated quite a lot, even at a population-based level, which is not something you necessarily see a lot of. So is this a social deficit? Lotistics are definitely bad at this task. Now, why might that be if you look at things in my own biased way? It may not necessarily be that autistics don't notice that these interactions between two metric shapes or among geometric shapes resemble something social that involves mental states, but there are less likely and there are not going to totally get rid of the accurate information that these are just freaking triangles.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How autistic people perform in social tasks is high variance. It is very hard to pull out specific deficits where you can't point out areas where autistics have performed at least as well as typical people on the task. Now, there is an exception, which is the most replicated autistic deficit. I believe there's one finding in the contrary direction that all the rest, and there's a lot, especially for the autism literature, show what is considered autistic deficit. So this is the task of attributing deep mental states to geometric shapes. Usually there are triangles. They will be animated. They sort of move around. And it goes beyond simply attributing agency to the triangles.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That autistic people were better at drawing impossible figures, so impossible figures are like Penrose triangles. They're things that you can't build. And so this was interpreted as a couple of possible deficits. You know, they're not failing to see the global structure, for instance. Yet, if you ask autistic people, the impossible figure is impossible, they know it's impossible. So autistics can have both the possibilities. They understand that an impossible figure is a sort of possible drawing.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say no keep in mind what I think here is not that autistics don't have biases. Autistics can, they will process information atypically within that range is the possibility of checking what is the typical hierarchy, even if it won't be mandatory though. That won't be it. They will consider other possibilities. So that will attenuate biases as opposed to strengthen them. And that, I think, is what you find in the literature, you know, again, depending whether the task is sufficiently complex for that to show up, what the task demands are. You know, my favorite of these is that though it doesn't, it's a bit dodgy because it comes from a couple different papers, but it shows where a bit of my background going way back in perception.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very mixed and it's very picky about the task and the instructions. So some more than others, I think that the table, and I'm trying to remember the shepherd's table, or have I got the name of the table right? The table illusion has been replicated. The one with the line, now I've forgotten its name, has been replicated. Others, not so much. And it's very mixed. I don't think that there's a question of what can autistic see an illusion. They probably can. Do they consider other possibilities? Yes, they do, and they will consider other possibilities that the typical population might not. So that produces some differences in results depending on the task and so on.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, noticing that two offers, which are posed in different ways are actually identical, are being more likely to notice the outcome will be identical however it's supposed. So those are framing effects. Now that's been replicated once where, in effect, the autistics are less likely to be fooled by the framing, so they detect when two situations are the same, whereas the typical group are biased such that they are fooled by the framing. It's not 100%, but autistics are just, they will still consider it.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a literature testing some of these biases. The short answer is yes. I think in all cases you would want a bigger literature. You'd want to wait for replications and so on.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of autistic people, it really has impeded research. And we do not have a definition for autism severity, but it gets that idea, that bias, very unhelpful and harmful bias that the more atypical an individual is, the more there must be wrong with them. I mean, an autism has been, you know, if you want to take autism so much the paradigmatic case of that happening. So if you want to make a case for that, autism would be where to do it.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source