Development of Perceptual and Conceptual Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding of Social Situations in Neurodevelopmental Disorders - PERS

KEY WORDS

Intellectual developmental disorders, Autism spectrum disorders, Analogical reasoning, Perspective taking, Interpersonal communication, Eye-tracking

CITY

COUNTRY

France

DETAILS OF THE OFFER

Working place: C2S lab / Reims Champagne-Ardenne university

Mission:

This project aims to provide a new explanation for the difficulties in understanding social situations observed in individuals with intellectual developmental disorders (IDD) and/or autism spectrum disorders (ASD). People with these disorders encounter difficulties, particularly in social life, for example, when they face new situations that they struggle to understand. The project's objective is to test the hypothesis that analogical reasoning abilities play a role in these difficulties. According to Green et al. (2017), analogical reasoning forms the basis for understanding new social situations. Data from some research conducted with individuals with ASD suggest the preservation of analogical reasoning abilities, including for stimuli with social content. Yet, these studies cannot truly be considered representative of analogical reasoning abilities in ASD because they only involve participants with ASD without IDD, although these disorders are associated in one-third of individuals. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the co-occurrence of both disorders. The studies conducted as part of the thesis will evaluate the analogical reasoning skills of children with IDD and/or ASD in tasks that may or may not have a social dimension. As literature has highlighted difficulties in perspective taking, both visual and social, observations related to the implementation of analogical reasoning will be supplemented by experiments involving perspective taking. This will help determine whether the difficulties encountered are inherent to a misunderstanding of situations involving a human/social scenario, a lack of perspective taking, or both. Behavioral data will be linked to data collected via eye-tracking.

The recruited PhD student will complete their thesis at the C2S laboratory and will be supervised by Christelle Declercq (Professor in psychology, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne) and Annick Comblain (Professor in speech therapy, University of Liège). The project will also be carried out in collaboration with Nicolas Dollion (Assistant professor, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne). The activities will cover all stages of the project: literature review, protocol design, data collection and analysis, scientific communications and publications, as well as dissemination of research results.

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