I do hope that this promotion helps emphasize the importance and stature of UCL’s work toward developmental diversity. It is an equally great “get” for the Centre for Doctoral Education, the Culture, Communication and Media department, the Knowledge Lab and UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and in particular, the Development Diversity Lab. I enjoy promoting our leaders and colleagues whenever and wherever possible. Congratulations to David and all at the DDL!
Kat and Jo published their paper An observational study of social interaction skills and behaviors in Cornelia de Lange, fragile X and Ruinstein-Taybi syndromes in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. This paper described the profile of strengths and weaknesses in behaviours indicative of social interaction skills, social enjoyment, social motivation and social discomfort to characterise sociability in genetic syndromes and explore whether these skills are associated with age and autistic traits.
The National Institute for Health Research—UK’s largest funder of health and care research—recently awarded one of two grants to David Ruttenberg to carry out Patient Public Involvement (PPI) research for the SensorAble project on Adaptive Wearable Appropriateness as an Autistic intervention. This award is made possible through the generous support of the University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. You can learn more about that SensorAble project here at the project website. Congratulations to David and all at the DDL!
We are excited to announce that our lab leader, Sarah White, has been awarded a Royal Society Enhancement award to study in-group v/s out-group effects in mentalizing — the ability to use other’s mental states such as beliefs, desires and intentions, to predict their behaviour.
The study will investigate how your mentalizing ability is influenced when another person is similar or dissimilar to you. The project will therefore investigate if there is any difference in how autistic and neurotypical individuals mentalize when another person is more or less similar to them.
Malwina, our research assistant, will be taking a lead on this project. If you are interested in learning more, please send Malwina an email!
We’re delighted that Ruihan has been transferred from the degree of MPhil to that of PhD with her study on “Effects of compensation on mentalizing and mental health in the broader autism phenotype”. Congratulations Ruihan!
By adding laughter in front of bad ‘Dad’ jokes, the jokes were perceived to be funnier. And the kind of laughter had a further effect on the funniness of the jokes. Spontaneous ‘real’ laughs made jokes even funnier than adding posed ‘fake’ laughter. Also, we found the same modulation of funniness by laughter in autistic adults.
This paper received a high amount of media attention.
And it was the most read paper on the Current Biology website
After her MSc, Karen stayed on in the DevDivLab to help with filming some new stimuli, programming the eyetracker and collecting pilot data. In December, it was time for Karen to head home to Singapore, so the DevDivLab had a meal out at a traditional Singaporean restaurant. Very best wishes for the future, Karen!
Sarah gave a webinar for the British Dyslexia Association entitled “What is autism?” as part of their series on a range of neurodevelopmental conditions associated with dyslexia. The purpose was to raise awareness that dyslexic children may also have autistic traits more often than expected, to help teachers and other education professionals understand how the autistic mind takes in and processes information, and to think through how this may impact on teaching practices.
On 8 November 2019, David participated as both a presenter and panelist discussing the importance of Early Intervention for medical practitioners, licensed therapists and educational specialists. Florida Atlantic University hosted the daylong event on the Jupiter, Florida campus.
In September, Jo started a lectureship at the University of Surrey. Slowly over the next year, the projects that Jo leads on will be shifting to be based in Surrey. Jo is still an Honorary Research Fellow at the ICN, and Jo & Sarah will continue to collaborate on Fragile X and autism projects – long may that continue!
