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Selective Impairments in Action Understanding and Movement Intentionality in Young Children with Autism When Compared to Williams Syndrome
Objectives: Here we compare the ability to understand and predict others’ intentional actions and movement interference in preschoolers with ASD when compared to a matched sample of children with WS, and typically developing (TD) children. Specifically, we aimed to identify whether deficits in encoding motor intentions and movement execution during incongruent actions are specific to ASD, and explore the extent of association with cognitive and social functioning.
Methods: Using novel experimental behavioral and eye tracking tasks that were video-recorded, we examined childrens’ movement interference when observing a models’ incompatible actions and their understanding of the intended goal of reaching actions across the following conditions: 1) observation of a model performing either congruent or incongruent actions (e.g. placing coins in a moneybox, stacking rings in correct order), 2) coding of childrens’ movement efficiency (time and effective actions) during incongruent versus congruent conditions, and (3 patterns of anticipatory looking to a target during successful or failed attempts by a model to reach over a barrier to retrieve it.
Results: Preliminary findings suggest that children with ASD showed significantly reduced movement interference time during incongruent relative to congruent actions when compared to TD children. Interestingly, reduced movement interference during action observation correlated with greater severity of symptoms in social affect and restricted repetitive behavior in ASD. Although there were no group differences in anticipatory fixations or duration to goal-directed reaching actions, less anticipatory fixations to the target correlated with greater severity of autism symptoms in children with ASD.
Conclusions: Our findings add to the growing evidence base supporting a critical role for motor system dysfunction contributing to difficulties in the social domain in young children with ASD. Direct cross-syndrome comparisions will be important in revealing autism-specific impairments in motor cognition which may lead to new treatment targets for core ASD symptomatology.
See more of: Sensory, Motor, and Repetitive Behaviors and Interests