Aim: A wealth of literature has contributed to our understanding of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However most of this research has been carried out with white families and there is a paucity of research documenting ethnic minority families' experiences of ASD. The current study attempted to address this limitation in the research. The aim of the study was to explore South Asian parents' experiences of their child's Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis process. Method: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to analyse data from interviews with 8 parents (5 families) who had a child diagnosed with ASD. Parents were recruited from schools, child and adolescent mental health services, local authority child services, mosques and support groups. Results: Four super-ordinate themes were developed from the analysis. These included the early search for support, meeting the family: the extended family's rejection of ASD, a tug of war: finding a safe person and place in services and the struggle to maintain cultural links. Conclusions: The findings suggest that in addition to common challenges reported by all families during their child's ASD diagnosis process, South Asian families face unique challenges that arise due to specific cultural factors (e.g. language, cultural and religious beliefs). One of the key findings of the research is the loss of culture South Asian parents experience as a result of the ASD diagnosis. A range of implications for clinical practice that arise from the results are also described.

The aim of this thesis was to examine aspects of conceptual and non-inferential role-taking that are intact or limited in individuals with autism. More specifically, this thesis examined the ability to adopt different psychological perspectives, based on the hypothesis that basic non-inferential role-taking processes, related to the way we identify with the attitudes and feelings of other people, are relatively lacking in individuals with autism. Such processes might be important for the understanding of different perspectives in other people. The series of studies presented in this thesis investigated role-taking in individuals with autism, relative to chronological and verbal mental age matched groups of participants without autism. The studies focused on three main areas of research: narrative role-taking, deictic understanding, and interpersonal non-verbal communication. In the first study, participants were asked to tell stories from the point of view of different characters. In the second study, a set of tasks examined production and comprehension of verbal and non-verbal deictic expressions. The third study examined the processes of interpersonal engagement and role-taking, by focusing on the nonverbal communication exchanged between two people in the context of a one-to-one interaction. The results from the studies provide evidence suggesting that individuals with autism show aspects of role-taking ability that are both limited and intact, which may be better explained by an impairment in interpersonal, and non-inferential role-taking, than by cognitive, and conceptual, limitations.

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This thesis was motivated by the hypothesis that a continuum of cognitive style may exist in the general population, from strong to weak coherence. On this conceptualisation, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are proposed to lie at the extreme weak coherence or detail-focused end of the continuum. A battery of 14 coherence measures was administered to over 200 typically developing (Tn) individuals, 31 individuals with ASD, and 31 age- and IQ-matched control participants. The pervasiveness of central coherence was tested across visuo-spatial and auditory/verbal domains, and high- and lowlevels of processing. Age and IQ were typically related to task performance in the TD group, but a large proportion of variance remained unexplained and may reflect cognitive style. Low-level tasks were associated within and across visual and auditory domains, suggesting some consistency in individual differences. High-level tasks did not show such consistency, suggesting that executive/strategic processes may have greater effect on task performance than local-global processing style. Males showed greater detail-focus and stronger developmental effects (more global with age) than females on several measures. Weak coherence was demonstrated in ASD by local processing bias and lack of global bias. Local and good global processing appeared to be more in trade-off in the ASD group than in TD and control groups. Good local processing related to IQ in TD and controls, but less so in ASD suggesting local bias is more automatic to individuals with ASD. Subgroups were determined on the basis of performance across the battery, according to whether local or global processing was dominant, or whether an individual adapted well or poorly to the demands of the task. A consistent local processing style was more common in the ASD group than in the control group, but was not universal The implications of these findings for weak central coherence theory of ASD are discussed.

It has been suggested that autism is characterised by a cognitive style biased towards local rather than global information processing. This cognitive style is known as weak central coherence. There is a wealth of experimental evidence which illustrates that when compared to controls, individuals with autism show superior performance on tasks which require detail-focussed information processing. There is also emerging evidence that some individuals with autism have a deficit in the perception of coherent motion. This thesis presents the argument that deficit in a single aspect of visual processing could underlie both abnormalities in motion detection and the lack of global bias or weak central coherence shown in visual tasks in autism. Using random dot kinematograms to measure coherent motion detection and traditional tests of central coherence and local/global information processing (the children's embedded figures test and Navon tasks) it was found that not all the children with autism in the sample had weak central coherence when compared to matched controls and that only a sub-group of children had specific difficulty in detecting coherent motion. However in some cases significant relationships between variables indicated that the children with poor motion detection ability were also the ones who showed superior performance on the CEFT and a lack of global bias in the Navon task. The findings are discussed in terms of areas of the visual magnocellular pathway / dorsal stream which might underlie both a deficit in coherent motion detection and a lack of global bias m autism.