Does Impaired Social Motivation Drive Imitation Deficits in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Abstract

There is clear evidence that children with autism spectrum disorder display deficits in imitation but little consensus on the reasons for these deficits. In this paper, we review evidence that suggests that the presence of imitation deficits may be explained in part by social communication deficits, specifically by impaired social motivation. First, we discuss the social role that imitation serves in typical development and how imitation may facilitate the forming of social connections. Then, we describe evidence that suggests that both the impairments in imitation that have been seen in some areas, and the relative sparing of imitation in other areas, can be explained by impairments in social motivation. Lastly, the importance of therapies to incorporate social communication skills when targeting imitation is emphasized. As more research needs to be done to empirically examine this hypothesis, suggestions of directions for future studies are discussed.

Object-directed imitation in autism spectrum disorder is differentially influenced by motoric task complexity, but not social contextual cues

“…At a biological level, this difference is thought to be rooted in the aberrant functioning of neural systems involved in processing social rewards in ASD (Stavropoulos and Carver, 2013). This disruption in social motivational processes has been posited to contribute to imitation deficits in this population (Van Etten and Carver, 2015). Evidence from typical development has indeed demonstrated that people imitate more when they are motivated to affiliate or create rapport with a social partner (for a review, see Chartrand and Lakin, 2013).…”

Study protocol of the multi-centre, randomised controlled trial of the Frankfurt Early Intervention Programme A-FFIP versus early intervention as usual for toddlers and preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (A-FFIP study)

“…Recent innovative eye-tracking and body-movement analysis studies aim at objectively measuring sensory perception [34], visual orientating preferences [35,36] and imitation abilities [37]. Perception, attention, and imitation impairments are likely to underlie core autistic symptoms [7].…”

A variation of the social context in the warm-up period influences 18-month-olds’ imitation

“…Accordingly, the modeled target actions are imitated more exactly by the infants, even if the actions are irrelevant to achieve a certain outcome or to manipulate an object. Hence, it has been suggested that infants' exact imitation can be used as an indicator of social motivation (e.g., Carpenter, 2006;Van Etten & Carver, 2015). In contrast, alternative theories explain infants' variation in imitative behavior according to what infants interpret as the models' intentions or goals to be: infants imitate the modeled actions more exactly when no other end-state of an action could be perceived as a goal.…”