pretend play in asd

[hungryhippo21]

i am hoping someone can enlighten me, ds is 2.6 and had a busy week last week. Amongst various appts he was given teddy and some food, teddy was fed by the adult (he has seen this before) so ds1 was expected to fedd teddy which he then did. What I cant understand is - yes if the food and teddy is placed in front of him he will fed the teddy because that is expected of him he know it makes the grown ups happy. When he is not being watched he will put food in cups take it out, the food becomes just more objects to fiddle with. If he does feed the teddy it is when he knows i am watching and he will smile at me expecting a big well done which he gets, the difference with his other toys is he then smiles to himself when he completes a puzzle etc.
what I am trying to get at is when he goes for appts and the say pretend play is emerging is it? or is he just doing what is expected to please adults.
Sorry loads of waffle just dont know what to make of it.

How interesting about the brain scans Amber. This seems so much more useful than questionnaires about whether one prefers the theatre or a museum. But as I believe you have pointed out, present models are obsessed with measuring deficit rather than exploring differences. Let's hope such tests get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Do you know of any easily accessible reading matter on this topic that you could recommend as it is so interesting?

I think I understand a tiny part of what it's like to be you because I think my brain is wired differently from most people's about faces. 90%+ of the population seem to remember faces instinctively. This is a mystery to me. For me, the unique characteristics of a particular face are information that's laboriously gathered and easily lost. I'm sure I'm using a less-than-ideal part of my brain for it. I've developed coping mechanisms. No-one knows that when I go to an important meeting, I'm worrying most about whether I'll recognise my own client if I've only met him once before. I always arrange to meet the client in advance in a place where there won't be too many other people. Yet I do seem to use this instant recognition part of the brain for other things. When a piece of the sheet music went missing the other day in our string trio rehearsal, I was able to sing everyone their part so we could play without it - I hadn't tried to learn their parts, it was just instinctive to pick up and keep the melodic lines in my brain. Does this sound familiar to you?

Familiar? That's half the story of my life

I can lose my own son in any crowd. I fail to recognise old friends because their hair is different. I can recognise them if I stare at them long and hard and really concentrate, so it's not completely hopeless - I've learned the mechanism to let my brain eventually find the right info - but normally people can recognise faces in less than a tenth of a second, not after ages and ages of careful consideration.

Easily readable material? Goodness me, not really found much yet. There's lots of technical stuff e.g. brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/124/10/2059 so that's worth a try if you can stand it?

Going back to the OP and including what you have said about the scans Amber, it seems to be suggesting that the teddies do have a place in diagnosing ASDs but that the problem arises with poorly trained HCPs who don't properly interprete the child's responses.

I think to be sure that a child didn't have an ASD they would have to take the game further than just feeding the teddy because they were asked to do that - they would then pretend to put it to bed or change a nappy or whatever. Their play has to go beyond the initial instruction to feed the teddy. Maybe the docs should be asking the child to pretend it was a baby and see if they could actually do this.

The brain scan research is very interesting. Did they test people the full length of the spectrum, do you know? I might be an awful mother for not noticing (higly likely) but my DS has never shown any signs of having trouble dealing with faces or recognising people. Wouldn't if be fantastic if a scan could clear this up for us once and for all!

There are conditions, usually as a result of brain damage, where people literally can't see faces. They can identify non-face objects but they can't identify faces at all, even of those they have know for years and have loved. Apparently they see features as jumbled up and fuzzy, yet their eyesight is normal. Presumably the brain is damaged in the area relating to face recognition. They also don't seem to be able to get their brains to compensate for this. I find it interesting that those on the ASD spectrum do seem to have a means of compensating. Perhaps because they have been doing it from birth. It would be great if the ASD brain research allowed those with face blindness to use another part of the brain to start regaining some of that face recognition ability.

Niecie, I think you could be right, yes. The Teddy test could be a good one for testing an ASD, but the real question is whether a child can care for something and realise the social significance for it. Still not 100% sure how you'd test accurately, though. Bearing in mind that I was caring perfectly adequately for real live pets from a very early age but still saw absolutely nil value in pretending to care for a plastic doll, it can be something far more subtle.

The specialist said that they are very bad at spotting ASDs in girls, because of these sorts of differences. The standard tests don't always spot us.

I'm reasonably close to not being able to see faces in any meaningful way, as explained elsewhere on here today. I recognise people by their clothes, hair, walking style, voice, etc. Their faces(unless very distinctive) are irrelevant. Interestingly, I can't draw faces either, despite being able to draw animals, birds, buildings, anything else perfectly. But dh who's also ASD is much better at knowing who's who, so sometimes it's more a drop in speed of recognition than a complete problem. I make sure I've got people with me who know who everyone else is, or I make people wear name labels

They are indeed testing the full length of the spectrum in these scanner things, but need more cash. Much more. Strange looking machine as well - like the biggest salon hairdryer you've ever seen. www.medgadget.com/archives/img/36658324.jpg

Perhaps we are focusing too much on the teddies. It isn't the only thing they use to dx somebody, is it?

It seems a lot of it is tied up in the way you are with the doctor/psychologist. The one big thing about my DS that obviously sets him apart from his peers, for example, is the way he speaks. He doesn't have quite the same tone and inflections with his speech although he has great verbal and comprehension skills. It is a very subtle difference you can't pick up by doing tests.

My word that machine looks like something out of Star Trek! I should imagine it would completely freak out a small child!

Nope, there's lots they use to diagnose young children. The common CHAT test for toddlers (see Autism Research Centre website) suggests, for example, they get the child's attention, then point across the room at an interesting object and say "Oh look! There?s a (name of toy)!" Does the child look across to see what they are pointing at?

Or, get the child?s attention, then give child a miniature toy cup and teapot and say "Can you make a cup of tea?" Does the child pretend to pour out tea, drink it, etc?
Odd, because logically the answer to the question "can you make a cup of tea" is either "yes" or "no". The child hasn't been asked to actually make it.

There again, this probably demonstrates our way of thinking quite nicely