Encephale
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While traumatic brain injury is a major public health issue, schizophrenia-like psychosis following traumatic brain injury is relatively rare and poorly studied. Yet the risk of developing schizophrenia-like psychosis after traumatic brain injury is 3 times more important than in the general population. ⋯ Further systematic studies are needed to confirm this hypothesis.
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Theory of mind deficit can be used to explain social and communication impairments that define the autism spectrum disorder. Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states to self and others in order to understand and predict behavior. It involves the distinction between the real world and mental representations of the world. Several studies established that high functioning autistic individuals and individuals with Asperger syndrome (ASP) tend to be as proficient as controls in understanding first order false belief tasks. In contrast, they still lag behind their typical peers in understanding second order false belief tasks or more advanced tasks of theory of mind (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1993). Most of these studies focus on the adult population and it seems particularly interesting to investigate whether children with ASP would present the same pattern of strengths and deficits as adults. In our research, children with ASP were tested in an advanced task of theory of mind based on a visual presentation of comic strips and in a more traditional assessment of false belief understanding: the Smarties test. ⋯ Our data clearly demonstrated that children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism exhibited an impairment in understanding the intention of others. In the comic strip task, children with ASP have more difficulties in the character's intention condition than in the physical causality condition. This impairment is not imputable to a deficit in taking into account the context (Weack Central Coherence theory) since they performed as well as controls in the physical causality condition which also required the processing of the whole scene. In contrast, all children with ASP succeeded at the false belief task. These contradictory findings suggest that, although testing theory of mind, the two tasks do not tap similar mechanisms. It is possible that the use of verbal material in the false belief task improved performance of the ASP children who are known to present particular strengths in this domain. Another possible explanation that needs further testing would be that the level of complexity differs between the two tasks.