Abstract
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suffer from numerous impairments in social interaction that affect both their mental and bodily coordination with others. We explored here whether interpersonal motor coordination may be an important key for understanding the profound social problems of children with ASD. We employed a set of experimental techniques to evaluate not only traditional cognitive measures of social competence but also the dynamical structure of social coordination by using dynamical measures of social motor coordination and analyzing the time series records of behavior. Preliminary findings suggest that children with ASD were equivalent to typically developing children on many social performance outcome measures. However, significant relationships were found between cognitive social measures (e.g., intentionality) and dynamical social motor measures. In addition, we found that more perceptually-based measures of social coordination were not associated with social motor coordination. These findings suggest that social coordination may not be a unitary construct and point to the promise of this multi-method and process-oriented approach to analyzing social coordination as an important pathway for understanding ASD-specific social deficits.
Highlights
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit numerous impairments in social interaction that typically persist throughout adolescence and adulthood (American Psychiatric Association, 2000; Howlin et al, 2004)
Given all the inconsistency in the literature and the fact that less research has explored the synchronized movement deficits in ASD even though findings indicate that, like imitation, the ability to move in synchrony with another seems to be impaired early and may impact the development of intersubjectivity (Trevarthen and Daniel, 2005; Yirmiya et al, 2006), this paper evaluates the usefulness of the dynamical techniques for exploring the relationship between motorically-based and cognitively-based conceptions of social competence
Parents rated the children with ASD lower on all the parentalreport rating scales except communication, but children with ASD were not significantly different from typically developing (TD) children on most of the social cognitive tasks (IJA, responding to joint attention (RJA), theory of mind, behavioral reenactment intentionality)
Summary
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit numerous impairments in social interaction that typically persist throughout adolescence and adulthood (American Psychiatric Association, 2000; Howlin et al, 2004). These deficits severely impede mental and physical development, learning, and behavioral functioning at home and in the community and make successful treatment difficult. Synchronized bodily coordination has been proposed to be a basis for the development of intersubjectivity in that it provides a basis for “sharing time” and has been proposed to be predictive of later more cognitive Whereas both imitation and interactional synchrony are evident shortly after birth, more cognitive forms of social connectedness emerge later. More complex cooperation tasks that require understanding the goal of another, sharing the goal, and coordinating actions are evident in typically developing children between 18 and 24 months (Warneken et al, 2006)
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