Original, wildly exciting but wrong, paper gets in Biological Psychiatry, impact factor 8.67
New, boring correction gets in Vision Research, impact factor 2.33
Needless to say, the original paper would never have made it past the referees in Vision Research.

See also non-replication published last year, reported by Armando Bertone's lab (down the hall).

Now this is how things are supposed to work in science. Go replication!

I can shed some light on this misunderstanding i believe.

Talking about HFA since i can't talk much to deep autists HFA is accompanied by a heightened sense of detail. It's not that our eyesight is better, we just see more details that others escape.

So all these tests are targeting the wrong part.

What one should do is let HFA's and NT's watch a action packed movie.

During the movie they have to record what they see.

Then you get results.

If i watch a movie ( a bit hazy because my glasses aren't quite right) of a highspeed carchase full of fast cuts and action it strikes me that the plates on chased car front and back don't match.

Things like that. Which makes it hard to watch a movie since every little detail is noticed. Plotholes, in-continuity, little scars of cosmetic surgery,a bird flying in the background, etc etc.

In daily life its the same deal. There is no filter. Pretty annoying at times.

Are you expecting the same people who wrote this line: “Individuals with ASC have significantly better visual acuity (20:7) compared with control subjects (20:13)-acuity so superior that it lies in the region reported for birds of prey.” to have the sense to call for a retraction?

Sue: Good point, I changed that sentence. This doesn't say anything about vision in general, just about visual acuity, i.e. the ability to focus and resolve very small objects.

As petrossa says there is also the more general issue of noticing details and I think there's a lot of evidence for that.

But the point is that the original test was so flawed that they might as well have measured the subjects' pinky toes for all it told them about visual acuity. Sure, the original group might have had superior acuity, but there's no way of knowing that, and since the correctly executed study showed no difference, the hypothesis doesn't have much going for it right now.

Of course, this is the place for the old cliché about more research needed.

Sue

I totally agree that anything involving studies about autism is a moving target.

I am a moderator on a well visited HFA board and from the overwhelming anecdotal confluence of stories involving sensory processing to me it's very evident that at least true HFA have an extremely heightened sensory sensitivity.

Any sense. Vision it is the most obvious, there is general consensus amongst the posters they all have this issue with seeing way too much detail.

But touch, smell (therefore taste), hearing are also very acute.

It's as often a nuisance as a good thing. Since you can't switch it off you tend to get nauseous a lot but on the other hand you can be very good at tasks involving the senses.

The main reason for young HFA's (and maybe deep autistics) for throwing tantrums and the like is the overstimulation of the senses.

There is not one poster who doesn't avoid crowds, noisy places because of the bombardment of sensory input.

ADI and ADOS are circular confirmation systems of the DSM criteria and as such pretty useless.

If you setup a bunch of diagnostic criteria based on behavioral observation (pretty unscientific) then over the decades create further criteria/'refinements' and diagnostic systems based on those original iffy criteria you'll end up with a total mess.

DSM should be scrapped. Then a thorough delineation between physical and non-psychical mental anomalies should be made using any scan system (except fMRI ofcourse).

Once you have a baseline of true neuro-developmental issues and people with a bad childhood you can start to try and classify them.

My guess for the subject at hand: Schizophrenia, autism, aspergers, CC agenesis etc belong to the same category.

Petrossa's plan seems to assume that its actually possible to effectively classify mental illnesses based upon such criteria. If we can't identify a person as having a given illness using a scan, does his/her illness no longer exist? I think you're ignoring the fact that “illnesses” are defined by whether or not they affect life outcomes. Under this scheme, somebody whose scan indicates they have an illness but who doesn't require any kind of treatment might be classified as “schizophrenic” or whatever arbitrary name we might cook up, even without expressing any of the corresponding symptoms. And I'm not even all that sure what “non-physical mental anomalies” are supposed to be, much less how to identify them.

I don't object to distinguishing between illnesses using some diagnostically useful scanning technique, but I do think that scrapping the DSM is a bad idea. Perhaps, de-emphasizing the importance of the DSM might be better?

@Sue

Well, that's just the point. If the aetiology of a disease is unknown, then we need some means of identifying people who suffer from the disease. Now, I'm not saying that the DSM offers an ideal system of classification, nor even one that is necessarily valid. But I am skeptical of the claim that we have sufficient methods to identify and classify mental illness without using behavioural measures.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't attempt to develop more valid methods of distinguishing between mental illnesses. But it is clearly wrong to claim that we currently have the appropriate scanning methods to completely replace the DSM's function.

I agree with both the lack of proper tools to diagnose a neuro-developmental issues in a gestating foetus. That level of understanding how the connections propagate, nor therefore a mechanism for observing it has not yet been achieved.

I do think it's possible, once neuro-scientists latch on, to examine the white matter during infancy. Here the behavioral component is a must. The child behaves odd, the oddness conforms to a certain pattern, and one then studies the brain for clues.

Over time a general developmental structure can be educed and after that a disorder can be defined.

The problem the profession is faced with is the decades of lack of progress caused by the stubborn adherence to a wholly subjective collection of ancient criteria.

Talent in general is few and far between. One needs a very powerful mind indeed to overcome the corset of current educational systems.

Most people studying psychiatry, whilst having their own merits, will not be that talented they can avoid being indoctrinated with the idea's, theories and assumed facts installed on the basis of the DSM/DSM equivalent.

It's a circular process. Students inhale DSM and exhale DSM+ and thus become later the editors of DSM XV.

Yeah, like are you saying that the normal vision in autistic people was misdetected and it's not normal? And are you saying that larger objects look larger to them but smaller objects though they look larger than normal are quite likely to require a microscope like everyone else even if it looks bigger? Fascinating! Autism isn't autism any more, it's called Oppositional Defiance Disorder.