Correlates of Early Imitation Recognition in Preschoolers with ASD

Background: In typically developing children, implicit imitation recognition has been demonstrated early in life such that infants look longer and smile more at adults who are imitative. A developmental shift around 1 year is thought to occur during which children develop the ability to apply intention to others, and also begin to reliably exhibit behaviors associated with explicit imitation recognition (e.g. testing behaviors). Limited work has been conducted to date examining implicit and explicit imitation recognition skills in children with ASD.

Objectives: This exploratory study sought to examine the relationship between implicit and explicit imitation recognition (IR) and existing measures of joint attention and imitation in children with ASD.

Methods: Subjects were 30 preschoolers with autism who were systematically imitated during the course of a naturalistic imitation task. Measures assessing ASD symptomology, cognitive abilities, language skills, and joint attention were also completed for each child. Partial correlations, controlling for length of imitative period, between frequency of IR behaviors and our standardized assessments were conducted.

Results: Preliminary results suggest that frequency of children’s explicit IR behaviors is negatively correlated with ASD symptomatology, and positively correlated with scores on a measure of unstructured imitation. Implicit IR skills were positively correlated with measures of joint attention initiations.

Conclusions: Explicit recognition of being imitated is related to the ability to spontaneously imitate others as well as severity of autistic symptoms. Implicit recognition of being imitated is related to initiation of joint attention, owing perhaps to overlap in behaviors captured by the two measures (gaze to adult).