Brief Report: Visuo-spatial Guidance of Movement during Gesture Imitation and Mirror Drawing in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Thirteen autistic and 14 typically developing children (controls) imitated hand/arm gestures and performed mirror drawing; both tasks assessed ability to reorganize the relationship between spatial goals and the motor commands needed to acquire them. During imitation, children with autism were less accurate than controls in replicating hand shape, hand orientation, and number of constituent limb movements. During shape tracing, children with autism performed accurately with direct visual feedback, but when viewing their hand in a mirror, some children with autism generated fewer errors than controls whereas others performed much worse. Large mirror drawing errors correlated with hand orientation and hand shape errors in imitation, suggesting that visuospatial information processing deficits may contribute importantly to functional motor coordination deficits in autism.

Human-robot interaction as a tool to evaluate and quantify motor imitation behavior in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Children with ASD had consistently higher values than their age-matched controls. Our results are in line with other studies showing that imitation performance can be used to distinguish children with ASD, children with other development disorders and typically developing children [23]. Others have elevated the idea of imitation behavior and began work in designing therapies for ASD targeted towards developing the mirror neuron system, by imitation specific synchronized dance therapy [24].…”

“…People are likely to become familiar with robots that exhibit human-like features, appearance and characteristics. Additional studies confirm that human-like robots that do not have a mechanical-like appearance are treated differently in social settings [14,15]. On contrast, [16] proposed that is the robot appearance are too close to human-like features, an "uncanny valley" is created which leads to feelings of "repulsion" by humans.…”

Increased topographical variability of task-related activation in perceptive and motor associative regions in adult autistics

“…However, whether or not the groups differed in terms of accuracy in the imitation task should not affect our results as we were interested in within-group individual variability. Since all participants trained successfully at the task before scanning, and since this elementary task is performed at ceiling level in adults of average measured intelligence (Salowitz et al, 2013; Williams et al, 2004), the possible role of within-group difference in performance variability in our findings should be minimal.…”

Movement segmentation and visual perturbation increase developmental differences in motor control and learning

“…The results for the percentage of primary sub‐movement (Figure i,j,k,l) show that when the second movement segment was disturbed, the percentage of primary sub‐movement in the second movement segment decreased in all age groups. When conducting the second movement segment, the participants had to ignore the influence of the inverted image and adjust the relationship between their intended movement and the motor commands needed to complete the movement (Salowitz et al, ). As a result, the efficiency of central control was reduced.…”

“…In the mirror tracing task, the mirror‐reversed image presented to the subject induces conflicts not only between visual information and arm proprioception, but also between visual information and motor planning (Dobbelsteen, Brenner, & Smeets, ; Miall & Cole, ). To succeed in this task, performers must inhibit the dominant response and realign the spatial relationship between the visual stimuli and the limb (Salowitz et al, ).…”