too much, too young

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Page 1: Too Much, Too Young

www.Sc ient i f icAmerican.com/Mind Scientific AMericAn Mind 11

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The underdog creams a top-ranked opponent—and the crowd goes wild. But such a surge in the face of the odds is even more difficult than it appears, according to a recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. If status is on the line, people try harder to win when they are pitted against lower-ranked opponents.

Psychologists Nathan Pettit of Cornell University and Robert Lount of Ohio State University asked Cornell students to perform simple tasks in teams—for instance, writing down as many possible uses for a knife as they could come up with. The researchers falsely told the students that they were competing against another university that was ranked higher or lower than

Cornell—but they added that the tasks at hand were not indicative of academic performance, so the rankings should not predict which team would do better. When the students thought they were facing a lower-ranked school, they did better on the task.

“It could really be conservation of effort: I fight the battles that I can potentially win, but there are certain battles, no matter how hard I fight, I’m not going to win,” Pettit says.

The new study contradicts earlier research showing that when faced with a superior opponent in similar creative language tasks, people tend to work harder. But unlike the current study, which involved competition between

ranked schools, the earlier studies did not involve a threat to the competitors’ preexisting real-world status. So an-other motivating factor for the stu-dents in the new study could be the fact that performing worse than people of lower rank can mean a loss of status, says psychologist Naomi Ellemers of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. —Harvey Black

The average age at which children are diagnosed with autism is between three and four, but scientists have long suspected that the disorder starts much earlier. A key piece of evidence is a phenomenon known as brain over-growth. Autistic toddlers tend to have large brains for their age, and researchers have shown a correlation between the degree of excess growth and the severity of autism symptoms. Eric Courchesne, director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of California, San Diego, helped to pioneer the overgrowth hypothesis. Now he and his colleague Cynthia Schumann have published data that suggest the excess brain growth starts in the first year of life, if not sooner.

The study, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, is the first to evaluate brain growth and autism throughout early development. Using cross-sectional MRI scans, the U.C.S.D. researchers found overgrowth in autistic subjects as young as one and a half. At two and a half, the autistic subjects’ brains were 7 percent larger on average than the control group’s. Al-though why, exactly, excessive brain growth is related to autism remains a mystery, the new work helps to confirm that signs of the disorder appear early—knowledge that could lead to detection and treatments, such as behavior therapy, at a younger age. “The earlier the intervention, the better the outcome,” Courchesne says. —Erica Westly

>> cOMPetit iOn

Status MattersPeople try harder to beat a weakling than to topple a higher-ranked opponent

>> develOPMent

Too Much, Too YoungExcess brain growth may be the first sign of autism

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