Impaired Global, and Compensatory Local, Biological Motion Processing in People with High Levels of Autistic Traits

Jeroen J A Van Boxtel,Hongjing Lu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00209

Abstract

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are hypothesized to have poor high-level processing but superior low-level processing, causing impaired social recognition, and a focus on non-social stimulus contingencies. Biological motion perception provides an ideal domain to investigate exactly how ASD modulates the interaction between low and high-level processing, because it involves multiple processing stages, and carries many important social cues. We investigated individual differences among typically developing observers in biological motion processing, and whether such individual differences associate with the number of autistic traits. In Experiment 1, we found that individuals with fewer autistic traits were automatically and involuntarily attracted to global biological motion information, whereas individuals with more autistic traits did not show this pre-attentional distraction. We employed an action adaptation paradigm in the second study to show that individuals with more autistic traits were able to compensate for deficits in global processing with an increased involvement in local processing. Our findings can be interpreted within a predictive coding framework, which characterizes the functional relationship between local and global processing stages, and explains how these stages contribute to the perceptual difficulties associated with ASD.

Highlights

What it means to “see” has been succinctly characterized as “to know what is where by looking” (Marr, 1982)
EXPERIMENT 1: IMPAIRMENT OF AUTOMATIC GLOBAL PROCESSING IS ASSOCIATED WITH INCREASED NUMBER OF Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) TRAITS In Experiment 1, we investigated if, in a typical population, global biological motion information automatically attracts attention, and how this differs among individuals
Correlation analyses confirmed that in both conditions with global biological motion information, the performance on the central task increased with AQ score [r = 0.427, p = 0.034, and r = 0.313, p = 0.128], while there was no such correlation for the scrambled stimuli (r = 0.07, p = 0.726), see Figure 1C

Summary

Introduction

What it means to “see” has been succinctly characterized as “to know what is where by looking” (Marr, 1982). Different types of visual cues can be used for this task. You could use local cues, focusing just on the movement of the most important joint (e.g., the ankle). You could use global cues, such as the body posture (e.g., whether the opponent’s body is directed leftward or rightward) and overall body movements. To extract and analyze different cues such as these, the visual system consists of several processing stages, often broadly divided into low-level and high-level stages. The low-level stages perform local, detail-oriented processing of relatively simple stimulus features (e.g., orientation of body limbs or motion trajectory of individual joints), while high-level stages perform more global, contextual, and configural processing of stimuli (e.g., perceiving body structure and movements, action recognition, or interpreting social cues)

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