Laurent Mottron (born June 13, 1952) in France, is a psychiatrist, researcher, and a professor at Montreal University. He is a specialist in cognitive neuroscience research in autism at the University of Montreal.
Laurent Mottron | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 13, 1952 |
| Nationality |  Canada |
| Occupation | Psychiatrist |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | cognitive neuroscience |
| Institutions | University of Montreal |
He studied medicine at the University François-Rabelais (Tours) and in 1981 a medical thesis entitled how the opposition neurosis / psychosis works, and defended in 1983, a state thesis in humanities and sciences, entitled Common constraints to the acquisition, theory and pathology of the deixis at the University Paris 5-René Descartes. He has lived in Quebec since 1990, where he is now a full professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal. He holds the Marcel and Rolande Gosselin Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism at the University of Montreal since 2008, and is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences since 2019. Since 1997, his research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Several of his students now pursue an academic career, including Isabelle Soulières and Claudine Jacques. One of the particularities of his group is to regularly include autistic researchers, as Michelle Dawson, [1] with whom he has been collaborating for more than fifteen years. He is married to Quebec researcher Sylvie Belleville [2] and is the father of three children, including singer and songwriter Pierre Mottron.
He has authored over 150 scientific papers on cognitive neuroscience and autism. His early work is part of the general neuropsychology of pervasive developmental disorders and focuses on visual and auditory perception in savant and non-savant autism, studied through cognitive tasks and brain imaging. He is also interested in re-examining the role of intellectual disability, identifiable mutations and epilepsy in primary and syndromic autism, and the inclusion of autistic researchers in science. Along with the cognitive neuroscience research group on autism in Montreal, he develops the model of Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (2006), [3] an influencing theory for interpreting cognitive and imaging data in autism. This model has been extended recently by that of veridical mapping (2013), [4] on the strengths and talents of autistic, and the trigger-threshold-target model (2014), [5] on the links between mutations involved in autism, microstructural and regional plasticity, and enhanced perceptual functioning. In the area of intervention, he and his collaborators Véronique Langlois and Valérie Courchesne develop an intervention program based on autistic forces. More recently, he and his collaborators are trying to re-construct de novo "prototypical" phenotype of this condition, in order to reason its uncontrolled increasing reported prevalence.
In a letter published by Le Monde in 2012, Laurent Mottron expresses that he left France for Canada as opposed to the psychoanalytic approach of autism: "psychoanalysis has nothing to say or to do with the autism. Psychoanalysis is a belief, a practice that must remain limited to a relationship between consenting adults. It must be taken out of the care, especially of children (and not just autism). I went to Canada to flee that twenty years ago’’. In this letter, he also expresses his opposition to the ABA method, which he considers "scientifically unjustified and ethically questionable". [6] In Cerveau & Psycho, he writes: "Psychoanalysis has brought nothing to the understanding or the management of autism, neither in terms of practices nor in terms of knowledge". [7]
Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's syndrome or Asperger's, is a term formerly used to describe a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Asperger syndrome has been merged with other conditions into autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and is no longer considered a stand-alone diagnosis. It was considered milder than other diagnoses which were merged into ASD due to relatively unimpaired spoken language and intelligence.
Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. AP may be demonstrated using linguistic labelling, associating mental imagery with the note, or sensorimotor responses. For example, an AP possessor can accurately reproduce a heard tone on a musical instrument without "hunting" for the correct pitch.
Diagnoses of autism have become more frequent since the 1980s, which has led to various controversies about both the cause of autism and the nature of the diagnoses themselves. Whether autism has mainly a genetic or developmental cause, and the degree of coincidence between autism and intellectual disability, are all matters of current scientific controversy as well as inquiry. There is also more sociopolitical debate as to whether autism should be considered a disability on its own.
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College.
A block design test is a subtest on many IQ test batteries used as part of assessment of human intelligence. It is thought to tap spatial visualization ability and motor skill. The test-taker uses hand movements to rearrange blocks that have various color patterns on different sides to match a pattern. The items in a block design test can be scored both by accuracy in matching the pattern and by speed in completing each item.
Michelle Dawson is a Canadian autism researcher who was diagnosed with autism in 1993–1994. Since 2004, she has worked as an autism researcher affiliated with the Autism Specialized Clinic of Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Raven's Progressive Matrices or RPM is a non-verbal test typically used to measure general human intelligence and abstract reasoning and is regarded as a non-verbal estimate of fluid intelligence. It is one of the most common tests administered to both groups and individuals ranging from 5-year-olds to the elderly. It comprises 60 multiple choice questions, listed in order of increasing difficulty. This format is designed to measure the test taker's reasoning ability, the eductive ("meaning-making") component of Spearman's g.
Jean-Claude Maleval is a French Lacanian psychoanalyst, member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and emeritus professor of clinical psychology at the University of Rennes 2.
The weak central coherence theory (WCC), also called the central coherence theory (CC), suggests that a specific perceptual-cognitive style, loosely described as a limited ability to understand context or to "see the big picture", underlies the central issue in autism and related autism spectrum disorder. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, repetitive behaviours, restricted interests, and sensory processing issues.
Classic autism, also known as childhood autism, autistic disorder, (early) infantile autism, infantile psychosis, Kanner's autism, Kanner's syndrome, or (formerly) just autism, is a neurodevelopmental condition first described by Leo Kanner in 1943. It is characterized by atypical and impaired development in social interaction and communication as well as restricted, repetitive behaviors, activities, and interests. These symptoms first appear in early childhood and persist throughout life.
Autism, also called autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by symptoms of deficient reciprocal social communication and the presence of restricted, repetitive, and inflexible patterns of behavior that are impairing in multiple contexts and excessive or atypical to be developmentally and socioculturally inappropriate. Other common signs include difficulty with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, along with perseverative interests, stereotypic body movements, rigid routines, and hyper- or hypo-reactivity to sensory input. Autism is clinically regarded as a spectrum disorder, meaning that it can manifest very differently in each person. For example, some are nonspeaking, while others have proficient spoken language. Because of this, there is wide variation in the support needs of people across the autism spectrum.
Functional disconnection is the disintegrated function in the brain in the absence of anatomical damage, in distinction to physical disconnection of the cerebral hemispheres by surgical resection, trauma or lesion. Applications have included alexia without agraphia dyslexia, persistent vegetative state and minimally conscious state as well as autistic spectrum disorders. Functional disconnection itself is not a medically recognized condition. It is a theoretical concept used to facilitate research into the causes and symptoms within recognized conditions.
The visual word form area (VWFA) is a functional region of the left fusiform gyrus and surrounding cortex that is hypothesized to be involved in identifying words and letters from lower-level shape images, prior to association with phonology or semantics. Because the alphabet is relatively new in human evolution, it is unlikely that this region developed as a result of selection pressures related to word recognition per se; however, this region may be highly specialized for certain types of shapes that occur naturally in the environment and are therefore likely to surface within written language.
The relationship between autism and memory, specifically memory functions in relation to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is an ongoing topic of research. ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by social communication and interaction impairments, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior. In this article, the word autism is used to refer to the whole range of conditions on the autism spectrum, which are not uncommon.
Marian Diamond Sigman (1941–2012) was a developmental and child clinical psychologist known for her research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD). At the time of her death, she was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The mechanisms of autism are the molecular and cellular processes believed to cause or contribute to the symptoms of autism. Multiple processes are hypothesized to explain different autism spectrum features. These hypotheses include defects in synapse structure and function, reduced synaptic plasticity, disrupted neural circuit function, gut–brain axis dyshomeostasis, neuroinflammation, and altered brain structure or connectivity.
The frontoparietal network (FPN), generally also known as the central executive network (CEN) or, more specifically, the lateral frontoparietal network (L-FPN), is a large-scale brain network primarily composed of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex, around the intraparietal sulcus. It is involved in sustained attention, complex problem-solving and working memory.
The theory of the double empathy problem is a psychological and sociological theory first coined in 2012 by Damian Milton, an autistic autism researcher. This theory proposes that many of the difficulties autistic individuals face when socializing with non-autistic individuals are due, in part, to a lack of mutual understanding between the two groups, meaning that most autistic people struggle to understand and empathize with non-autistic people, whereas most non-autistic people also struggle to understand and empathize with autistic people. This lack of understanding may stem from bidirectional differences in communication style, social-cognitive characteristics, and experiences between autistic and non-autistic individuals, but not necessarily an inherent deficiency. Recent studies have shown that most autistic individuals are able to socialize, communicate effectively, empathize well, and display social reciprocity with most other autistic individuals. This theory and subsequent findings challenge the commonly held belief that the social skills of autistic individuals are inherently impaired, as well as the theory of "mind-blindness" proposed by prominent autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen in the mid-1980s, which suggested that empathy and theory of mind are universally impaired in autistic individuals.
The history of autism in France is marked by the strong influence of psychoanalysis, and by the persistence of institutionalization practices that violate the fundamental rights of autistic people. According to estimates at the end of 2016, 0.7 to 1% of the French population has an autism spectrum disorder, most of which is undiagnosed, leading to varying degrees of disability.
The employment of people with autism is a social issue that is being addressed more and more frequently. These people suffer one of the lowest employment rates among workers with disabilities, with between 76% and 90% of them being unemployed in Europe in 2014 and ca. 85% in the USA in 2023. Similarly, in the United Kingdom 78% of autistic adults are unemployed. This is depite the fact, that "approximately 50% of people with autism spectrum disorder have an IQ in the average to high range and do not have any additional physical needs."
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
