Autistic children show spared imitation of communicative symbolic and object-related gestures

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Autistic children show spared imitation of communicative symbolic and object-related gestures Joana C. Carmo1* and Raffaella I. Rumiati1 1 SISSA - International school for advanced studies, Italy Imitation is classically thought as a learning mechanism. In studies of autism, specific deficits of this human competence have been described. However whether this deficit is restricted to a certain type of gesturing is still under debate. For example, Williams et al. [1] claim that the deficit is confined to imitative skills of meaningless actions, while others found that both healthy and autistic children share the same tendency to imitate action’s goals [2]. In the present study we asked high functioning autistic children and age-matched typical children to imitate lists of several types of gesturing. These actions were either already known to the subjects or novel, meaningless actions. From those that could be retrieved from memory, they were either symbolic communicative or object-related, goal explicit actions. Importantly, an interaction effect between meaning x group was found, with a superior performance of meaningless actions by the control children. More, imitative performance of object-related actions and symbolic gesturing did not differ by any of the groups. These results are analyzed in light of a general dual route model for action imitation (e.g. Rumiati & Tessari, 2004), where imitative skills can be selective disrupted. Together, performance on two tasks of mental rotation was assessed and compared with the quality of imitation of meaningless and meaningful actions.