No differences in implicit hand maps among different degrees of autistic traits.
Autistic traits do not change how people feel where their hand is touched.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hidaka et al. (2023) asked adults to point to where they felt their hand was touched.
Some adults had autism. Some were neurotypical. All completed a short trait survey.
The team then compared how much each group’s hand map was stretched or squished.
What they found
Everyone’s hand map was warped the same way.
High or low autistic traits made no difference.
ASD and neurotypical adults showed identical distortions.
How this fits with other research
Haffey et al. (2013) saw that people with more autistic traits copied human hand movements less often. That study looked at social mimicry, not body sense.
Norris et al. (2012) showed that autism symptoms can group in different ways depending on age. Souta’s null finding now tells us those symptom patterns do not reach basic proprioception.
Greer et al. (2014) found clear social and rigidity factors in kids with ADHD. Souta extends that trait structure into adults and adds: body maps stay steady across the whole range.
Why it matters
You can keep using standard finger-localization or joint-matching tests with ASD clients. No need to create special norms or extra prompts. Expect the same built-in errors you see every day and treat them as baseline, not autism effects.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or higher levels of autistic traits have atypical characteristics in sensory processing. Atypicalities have been reported for proprioceptive judgments, which are tightly related to internal bodily representations underlying position sense. However, no research has directly investigated whether self-bodily representations are different in individuals with ASD. Implicit hand maps, estimated based on participants' proprioceptive sensations without sight of their hand, are known to be distorted such that the shape is stretched along the medio-lateral hand axis even for neurotypical participants. Here, with the view of ASD as falling on a continuous distribution among the general population, we explored differences in implicit body representations along with autistic traits by focusing on relationships between autistic traits and the magnitudes of the distortions in implicit hand maps (N ~ 100). We estimated the magnitudes of distortions in implicit hand maps both for fingers and hand surfaces on the dorsal and palmar sides of the hand. Autistic traits were measured by questionnaires (Autism Spectrum [AQ] and Empathy/Systemizing [EQ-SQ] Quotients). The distortions in implicit hand maps were replicated in our experimental situations. However, there were no significant relationships between autistic traits and the magnitudes of the distortions as well as within-individual variabilities in the maps and localization performances. Consistent results were observed from comparisons between IQ-matched samples of people with and without a diagnosis of ASD. Our findings suggest that there exist perceptual and neural processes for implicit body representations underlying position sense consistent across levels of autistic traits.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2979