The Perception of Animacy in Young Children with Autism

Abstract

Visual perception may be a developmental prerequisite to some types of social understanding. The ability to perceive social information given visual motion appears to develop early. However, children with autism have profound deficits in social cognitive function and may fail to see social motion in the same way that typically developing children do. We tested the hypothesis that children with autism fail to discriminate animate motion, using a novel paradigm involving simple geometric figures. The subjects were 23 children with autism (c.a. 70.7 mos.), 18 children with other developmental disabilities (c.a. 68.2 mos.), and 18 typically developing children (c.a. 46.4 mos.). Children saw two circles moving on a screen and were rewarded for identifying the one that moved as if animate. A control condition required children to identify the heavier of two objects. Children with autism initially showed a deficit in categorizing objects as animate (though no deficit on the control task), but showed no deficit in this ability after they had reached criterion in the training phase. These results are discussed in terms of the social orienting theory of autism, and the possibility that animacy perception might be preserved in autism, even if it is not used automatically.

Unimpaired Perception of Social and Physical Causality, but Impaired Perception of Animacy in High Functioning Children with Autism

“…Similarly, in Rutherford et al (2006) children with autism, when taught to distinguish animate from inanimate shapes based on motion cues suggesting internal versus external energy sources eventually performed at the same level as control children, but took significantly longer to learn. Both findings fit either with the view that children with autism orient less towards social information, even if they can process this information (Dawson et al 1998), or that they engage in strategic compensation to make up for deficient perception.…”

“…Many have treated the perception of animacy and of social causality or intentionality and goal-directedness as more or less equivalent (e.g., Scholl and Tremoulet 2000;Rutherford et al 2006), however, one concerns the nature of the agents, the other the interpretation of the events in which they engage. From knowledge about the event one might infer the identity of the agents, and conversely, the identity of the agents gives clues as to the type of event they likely engage in, but nevertheless, agent identification and event interpretation are not conceptually identical and can, as in this study, appear empirically distinct (see the current debate on how infants understand the social world, e.g., Biro and Leslie 2007;Gergely and Csibra 2003;Luo and Baillargeon 2005).…”

Mood assessment via animated characters: An instrument to access and evaluate emotions in young children

“…Instructions would need to be adjusted, however, so that children focused on the character's emotions rather than their own feelings. The ability to identify others' feelings is often compromised in children on the autistic spectrum [47,48]. Similarly, applications in educational settings for children with impaired emotion recognition due to learning disabilities could be developed.…”

Self–other relations in social development and autism: multiple roles for mirror neurons and other brain bases

“…In this study, impairment also correlated with autism severity. Others [Klin, 2000;Rutherford, Pennington, & Rogers, 2006] have detected a reduced sensitivity to animations in autism, where two geometric objects move as apparently autonomous agents. This has also been shown to be associated with decreased activity in the area of the pSTS and medial frontal cortex in autism [Castelli et al, 2002].…”