Forty years on: Uta Frith's contribution to research on autism and dyslexia, 1966–2006

Abstract

Uta Frith has made a major contribution to our understanding of developmental disorders, especially autism and dyslexia. She has studied the cognitive and neurobiological bases of both disorders and demonstrated distinctive impairments in social cognition and central coherence in autism, and in phonological processing in dyslexia. In this enterprise she has encouraged psychologists to work in a theoretical framework that distinguishes between observed behaviour and the underlying cognitive and neurobiological processes that mediate that behaviour.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Uta Frith herself for hosting me for the day during a most enjoyable interview about her academic history. Dorothy Bishop is supported by a Principal Research Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust.