Dame Uta Frith (née Aurnhammer; born 25 May 1941) is a German-British developmental psychologist and Emeritus Professor in Cognitive Development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She has pioneered much of the current research into autism and dyslexia. Her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma introduced the cognitive neuroscience of autism. She is credited with creating the Sally–Anne test along with fellow scientists Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen. Among students she has mentored are Tony Attwood, Maggie Snowling, Simon Baron-Cohen and Francesca Happé.
Education
Frith was born Uta Aurnhammer in Rockenhausen, a small town in the hills between Luxembourg and Mannheim in Germany. She attended the Saarland University in Saarbrücken with her initial plan for her education being in art history, but changed to experimental psychology after learning of its empirical nature. She was inspired by the work of psychologist, Hans Eysenck, who debunked psychoanalysis, and decided to train in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. While at the Institute she was taught by Jack Rachman, one of the pioneers of behaviour therapy. She went on to complete her Doctor of Philosophy, on pattern detection in autistic children, in 1968.
She was mentored, during her early career, by Neil O'Connor and Beate Hermelin and has described them as pioneers in the field of autism.
Research
Frith's research paved the way for a theory of mind deficit in autism. While she was a member of the Cognitive Development Unit (CDU) in London, in 1985 she published with Alan M. Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen the article "Does the autistic child have a 'theory of mind'?", which proposed that people with autism have specific difficulties understanding other people's beliefs and desires. Frith, along with Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen, created two theories of autism. The first is "lack of implicit mentalization" – lack of the ability to know ones own mental state. The second is "weak central coherence", by which she suggested that individuals with autism are better than typical at processing details, but worse at integrating information from many different sources. Frith was one of the first neuro-scientists to recognize "autism as a condition of the brain rather than the result of cold parenting." In 1985, Frith, Leslie, and Baron-Cohen created the Sally-Anne test to measure a child's cognitive understanding. A child with autism would generally get the Sally-Anne questions incorrect, while a typical child or a child with Down Syndrome would generally get the questions correct. In 1996, Frith, Eraldo Paulesu, and Maggie Snowling conducted a longitudinal research study showing that, while completing tasks requiring phonological processing, people with autism show a lack of connectivity between the front and back of their brain.
She was one of the first in the UK to study Asperger's syndrome, at CDU London. Her work focused on reading development, spelling and dyslexia. Frith attacked the theory that dyslexia was linked to lack of intelligence or caused by impairment in visual recognition. In 1980, she published a book on dyslexia, recounting how patients with dyslexia can be perfectly apt readers, but have persistent spelling errors, whereas it had commonly been thought was that the two entities were not mutually exclusive. Her research, along with Maggie Snowling's, showed that dyslexics tend to struggle with phonological processing.
Frith has been supported through her career by the Medical Research Council at University College London. Frith is an active collaborator at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University in Denmark. The goal of the centre is to provide a trans-disciplinary platform, upon which the many aspects of human interaction may be studied. The project is based in part on a paper written with Chris Frith: "Interacting Minds – a Biological Basis".
Supporting women in science
Frith has advocated the advancement of women in science, in part by developing a support network called Science & Shopping, which she hopes will "encourage women to share ideas and information that are inspiring and fun." She also co-founded the UCL Women network, "a grassroots networking and social organization for academic staff (postdocs and above) in STEM at UCL," in January 2013. In 2015 she was named chair of the Royal Society's Diversity Committee, where she has written about unconscious bias and how it affects which scientists receive grants.