Professor Dr Uta Frith

Research Priorities: Autism spectrum disorders, dyslexia, social cognition, neuroscience and learning
Uta Frith is a German-British developmental psychologist and neuroscientist. She established a novel approach to cognitive developmental disorders based on neuropsychological research. The research group, which she led, succeeded in identifying specific cognitive deficits in autism and dyslexia, and in tracing their basis in the brain.
Uta Frith employed methods from experimental psychology to understand novel cognitive processes like “Theory of Mind” and “Central Coherence”. Having a Theory of Mind means to intuitively track what others think and how they will likely react. Central Coherence refers to the drive to prioritize gist over detail, while detail focus prioritizes detail over gist. She showed that impairments in social communication that are characteristic of autism can be explained by a weakness in “Theory of Mind”. At the same time superior performance in autism can be partly explained by a preference for detail focus, as seen in distinct patterns of attention and a facility in detecting hidden figures.
Uta Frith successfully developed a nuanced description of different forms of autism. Since the 1980s, a mild form of autism was called “Asperger’s syndrome” after the Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger. By translating and interpreting Asperger’s seminal paper, Uta Frith contributed towards a new view of an autism spectrum that also encompassed individuals with high ability and talents.
Uta Frith’s second focus is on the reading and spelling disorders known as “dyslexia”. A weakness in phonological information processing is today considered the predominant cause of dyslexia in alphabetic languages, where readers have to learn how to map distinct speech sounds to letters. With colleagues Uta Frith pursued this hypothesis and discovered that Italian speaking dyslexics showed the identical brain abnormality while performing phonological tasks as English-speaking dyslexics, despite large cultural differences in their reading and spelling, due to differences in orthographic regularity.
While Uta Frith searched for the underlying cognitive causes of autism and dyslexia, she developed a framework that makes connections between brain and behaviour via the cognitive level. She proposed that disturbances at the cognitive level form an identifiable nexus in the otherwise obscure and complex relationships between brain, mind and behaviour.