This study investigated the development of deceptive behavior in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. We used a modified version of the game context and the temptation resistance paradigm. We tested two types of deception: concealing (simply hiding certain information from another person) and strategic (not only hiding information but also providing wrong information). Results showed that typically developing children started to engage in concealing deception at four years of age in the temptation resistance paradigm and at five years of age in the game context paradigm. On the other hand, children with ASD started to engage in concealing deception at a verbal mental age of seven years in both the temptation resistance and game context paradigms. Difficulty in spontaneously applying theory of mind in children with ASD was discussed.

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This study is the first to use salivary α-amylase activity (sAA) to evaluate stress in students with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) before and after medical care in schools for special needs education. Oral suction of sputum is one of the medical cares given in schools. And in this study, sAA, heart rate (HR), and degree of oxygen saturation (SpO₂) were measured for students before and after such suctioning. Results showed a significant rise in sAA and a rising trend in SpO₂ after the care, as well as a negative correlation between SpO₂ and sAA before the care. This indicates that while suctioning stabilizes oxygenation, it can also cause the student stress. Furthermore, sAA reflects the child’s physiological stress level during a low oxygenation state. In general, suctioning is performed only until a rise in SpO₂ and stabilization in HR. However, the findings indicate that sAA can highlight biological changes which cannot be ascertained through other measurements, and also show the significance of measuring sAA before and after medical care to ascertain the physiological and psychological condition of the student.

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The Kyoto Scale of Psychological Development (KSPD), a standardized developmental assessment tool for Japanese infants, and the Bayley Scales of Infant Development second edition (BSID-II) have been widely used in clinical assessments and research on infants. The purpose of this study was to compare the psychometric indices of the KSPD with those of the BSID-II in a large sample of Japanese infants. The KSPD and BSID-II were administered to 861 7-month-old infants and to 894 18-months old infants. All of the correlation coefficients between the two scales were significant except those between the Language-Social area of the KSPD and Language, Social facets of the BSID-II at 7 months of age. The findings of this study revealed that the results of the KSPD and BSID-II were comparable. There are many reports using the KSPD in Japan, and the findings based of the KSPD and BSID-II may be shared.

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Inhibition of automatic semantic processing was examined in children who have high functioning-pervasive developmental disorders (HF-PDD) with or without reading difficulty and in typically developing children. In Experiment 1, lexical decision tasks were conducted under three priming conditions: (1) normal character condition, (2) transposed-letter internal nonwords condition, and (3) transposed-letter external nonwords condition. The results indicated that all participants displayed semantic priming under the normal and transposed-letter internal nonwords condition, whereas semantic priming was not observed under the transposed-letter external nonwords condition. In Experiment 2, speed-reading was conducted under normal, transposed-letter internal nonwords, transposed-letter external nonwords condition, and nonword conditions. The results indicated that HF-PDD students with reading difficulty showed low reading scores under the nonword condition. Moreover, their reading score under the transposed-letter internal nonwords condition declined more than that under the nonword condition. The above results indicate that students with HF-PDD and reading difficulty have problems in conducting bottom-up processing while inhibiting top-down processing, when automatically generated semantic processing interferes with the processing conducted through the phonological route.

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Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are known to have poor verbal faculties, and numerous studies have shown impaired verbal short-term memory (STM). In this study, we examine whether long-term training in music can enhance the digit span of verbal STM among individuals with DS. Four musically trained and four untrained individuals with DS and eight typically developed (TD) persons participated in the experiment, where they were asked to recite digit strings (from 2 to 5 digits) that were uttered by a vocaloid, i.e. a vocal synthesizer, and the number of trials they could recall correctly was scored. TD participants could recall almost all digit strings correctly. The musically trained DS (MDS) group has significantly higher score from the 2-digits to 4-digits string test than the untrained DS (UDS) group. The results show that long-term music training can enhance the verbal STM of individuals with DS.

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The objective of this study was to examine which factors affect the generalization of mand for instruction. A boy with autism (7 years old) participated in this study. First, the participant was taught a mand for instruction in a “labeling photo cards” task. After successful acquisition of the mand, a generalization test was conducted. In this test, the participant was presented with various tasks (e.g., “labeling illustration cards,” “classifying cards,” “labeling objects,” and “matching”). These tasks were divided into four types on the basis of the three-term contingency. Tasks of type A had similar discriminative stimuli and response to the trained task, tasks of type B had similar discriminative stimuli to the trained task but response was dissimilar, and tasks of type C had a similar response to the trained task but discriminative stimuli was dissimilar. Tasks of type D had neither similar discriminative stimulus nor response. The results showed that mand for instruction generalized to tasks of types A and C. Thus, the primary factor for the generalization of mand for instruction is the similarity of the required task response.

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