The Naturalness of Biological Movement by Individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions: Taking Neurotypical Individuals’ Viewpoint

Abstract

BACKGROUND:When an action is being observed, it is matched to the observer’s internal representation of the action. The more similar, the more the action is perceived as natural. A factor influencing judgement of naturalness is the kinematic features of a movement. However, these features could be altered due to certain conditions that can modify movement such as Autism Spectrum Disorders. As a result, neurotypical observers may fail to interpret the action due to impaired naturalness.AIM:This work aims to investigate (1) whether neurotypical observers judge the autistic individuals’ movement as less natural, (2) which kinematic factors (jerk, acceleration, velocity and size) contribute to their perception and (3) whether cue reliance correlates with autistic traits.METHODS:Thirty neurotypical participants (20 – 33 years old; 15 males) completed autistic trait screening questionnaires (ADC, TAS-20, AQ). They completed a computer task showing 2D side-to-side arm movements recorded from neurotypical and autistic individuals. Finally, they rated the naturalness of the observed movements, and how certain they were with their answer.RESULTS:There was a significant difference between the participants’ perception of naturalness of the two movement groups. Jerk, acceleration and velocity contributed to shaping the participants’ perception with a jerk as the most significant factor. The correlation between the participants’ autistic trait and both their perception of naturalness as well as of each kinematic cue were not significant.CONCLUSION:Our neurotypical participants perceived the autistic movements as less natural. Their perceptions were influenced mainly by the jerk as well as acceleration and velocity of the autistic movements. Autistic traits in the participants did not correlate to their perception of movement naturalness nor to any of the kinematic factors.

Investigating Markers of Rapport in Autistic and Nonautistic Interactions

“…However, the extent to which looking at mouths would affect how someone feels they are being looked at, and potentially related feelings of rapport, is unclear; if nonautistic people view this behavior as unnatural, it may negatively impact their perception of the autistic person. 44 , 45 Second, participants were not blind to others' diagnostic status. As in some real-world contexts, diagnostic status may be known (e.g., speaking with a family member) and in others it may be unknown (e.g., asking a stranger a question), it will be important to replicate the study with participants unaware of their partner's diagnosis.…”

“… 50–52 This potential effect may reduce mutual gaze and backchanneling use more so than in casual conversation; thus, it may be interesting to explore other interaction contexts. There are also several other potential markers worth analyzing, such as facial expressions, hand gestures, interruptions, postural mirroring, word repetition, prosody, repair sequences, coherence of conversational turns, sudden movements, and general interpersonal synchrony, 10 , 44 , 45 , 53 which were excluded from this study as they were either too sparse in the available footage or would require more advanced technology to be measured effectively. We hope that these questions can be addressed in future studies of a larger scale.…”

Theory of autistic mind: A renewed relevance theoretic perspective on so-called autistic pragmatic ‘impairment’

“…This has been further supported by recent research in the social sciences that demonstrate the ways in which non-autistic people struggle to correctly infer autistic affective and mental states (e.g. Brewer et al, 2016;Edey et al, 2016;Heasman and Gillespie, 2017;Hubbard et al, 2017;Sheppard et al, 2016) and have a tendency to form negative thin-slice judgements about autistic people that can influence their desire to interact with them (Aransih, Edison and Penton, 2019;Morrison et al, 2019a;Sasson et al, 2017). Combined with research that has shown the ways in which autistic people experience high levels of mutual understanding and communicative effectiveness when interacting with other autistic individuals (e.g.…”

Level of autistic traits in neurotypical adults predicts kinematic idiosyncrasies in their biological movements

“…Moreover, given that both action and perceptual feedback are integral for the accurate production of movements, it is likely that the motoric differences in individuals with ASD also alter their interpretation of social movements. The mechanism for such an impairment is posited to occur via a mismatch between the perception of movements and the observer’s internal representation of those movements ( Aransih and Edison, 2019 ). For example, Gowen has proposed that many of the observed deficits in imitation in autism can be attributed to autistic children and adults failing to attend to relevant kinematic information that provides cues regarding intentionality and goals ( Gowen, 2012 ).…”

“…Motoric differences can also alter the production of the dynamic, moment-to-moment behavior that is integral to social communication (e.g., Brewer et al, 2016 ; Cook, 2016 ; Aransih and Edison, 2019 ; Bokadia et al, 2020 ). However, investigation of such behavior topography requires analysis at what has been described the microlevel of social interactions (e.g., Whyatt, 2017 ).…”