Intact and impaired mechanisms of action understanding in autism.

Abstract

Typically developing children understand and predict others’ behavior by extracting and processing relevant information such as the logic of their actions within the situational constraints and the intentions conveyed by their gaze direction and emotional expressions. Children with autism have difficulties understanding and predicting others’ actions. With the use of eye tracking and behavioral measures, we investigated action understanding mechanisms used by 18 children with autism and a well-matched group of 18 typically developing children. Results showed that children with autism (a) consider situational constraints in order to understand the logic of an agent’s action and (b) show typical usage of the agent’s emotional expressions to infer his or her intentions. We found (c) subtle atypicalities in the way children with autism respond to an agent’s direct gaze and (d) marked impairments in their ability to attend to and interpret referential cues such as a head turn for understanding an agent’s intentions.

Autism and the mirror neuron system: insights from learning and teaching

“…For example, a number of studies have documented normative processes of social behaviour, social understanding and social learning in ASD under particular circumstances (e.g. when processing information related to familiar versus unfamiliar people [78] or when processing emotionally meaningful versus emotionally neutral social signals [79]). Recent studies also suggest that social reward is not diminished in ASD under all circumstances [80].…”

Social Intervention Impacts Action Anticipation, Goal Extraction, and Social Interest in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Results of these studies show that school-age children with ASD produce anticipatory eye movements when observing a person repeatedly moving objects from one side of a table into a container on the other side (Falck-Ytter, 2010). Similarly, high functioning children and adolescents with ASD accurately predicted an actress's intentions based on her actions on objects, but not from her directional head turn cues alone (Vivanti, et al, 2011). However, children with ASD failed to shift their gaze from the actress's hands to her head while viewing the scene -unlike their neurotypically developing peers.…”

“…This confirms that children were able to predict the goal-directed action outcome better after just one prior exposure to the behavior. This finding indicates that young children with ASD benefit from trial-to-trial learning when observing the actions of another young child (here a toddler) as opposed to an adult (as in Vivanti, 2011). Observation and interpretation of actions performed by a peer rather than an adult represent an understudied area but are of great importance given typically developing children's strong interests in dynamic interaction with other children.…”

“…Faces and limb movements provide critical cues for action anticipation (Vivanti et al, 2011) and both are mapped onto the same brain region (superior temporal sulcus; Puce, Allison, Bentin, Gore, & McCarthy, 1998;Allison, Puce, & McCarthy, 2000;Servos, Osu, Santi, & Kawato, 2002). Specifically, the directions of gaze and head orientation provide referential cues that permit prediction about the focus of a person's attention (Phillips, Wellman, & Spelke, 2002).…”

“…Eye tracking paradigms have been used to examine action anticipation in children with ASD (Falck-Ytter, 2010;Vivanti, et al, 2011). Results of these studies show that school-age children with ASD produce anticipatory eye movements when observing a person repeatedly moving objects from one side of a table into a container on the other side (Falck-Ytter, 2010).…”