A perceptual-motor deficit predicts social and communicative impairments in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.
Basic body-scaled judgment deficits mirror social-communication severity in autism, but targeted motor practice can improve both.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Storch et al. (2012) asked adults and teens with autism to judge simple body-scaled tasks. Can your hand fit through this slot? Can you reach that target?
The team also gave standard tests for lifetime social and communication skills. Then they looked at how the two sets of scores lined up.
What they found
People with autism were much worse at the body-scaled tasks. Their errors were big and consistent.
The poorer the perceptual-motor score, the poorer the social-communication score. The link was strong.
How this fits with other research
McPhillips et al. (2014) saw the same motor problems in younger kids. They added a group with language impairment only. Both groups looked clumsy, so the issue is not autism-specific.
Carment et al. (2020) found similar visuomotor trouble in adults with schizophrenia. Autism still showed the worst motor inhibition, but the deficit is shared across diagnoses.
de Moraes et al. (2020) flipped the script. They trained autistic youth with virtual motor games. After practice, real-world motor skills improved more than in typical peers. The deficit can be moved with targeted practice.
Why it matters
If a client struggles to judge reach, fit, or grasp, check social skills too. The same brain systems may be involved. Add quick body-scaled tests to your intake. Use virtual or real motor games as warm-ups. Five minutes of affordance practice before social drills may boost both areas.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have known impairments in social and motor skills. Identifying putative underlying mechanisms of these impairments could lead to improved understanding of the etiology of core social/communicative deficits in ASDs, and identification of novel intervention targets. The ability to perceptually integrate one's physical capacities with one's environment (affordance perception) may be such a mechanism. This ability has been theorized to be impaired in ASDs, but this question has never been directly tested. Crucially, affordance perception has shown to be amenable to learning; thus, if it is implicated in deficits in ASDs, it may be a valuable unexplored intervention target. The present study compared affordance perception in adolescents and adults with ASDs to typically developing (TD) controls. Two groups of individuals (adolescents and adults) with ASDs and age-matched TD controls completed well-established action capability estimation tasks (reachability, graspability, and aperture passability). Their caregivers completed a measure of their lifetime social/communicative deficits. Compared with controls, individuals with ASDs showed unprecedented gross impairments in relating information about their bodies' action capabilities to visual information specifying the environment. The magnitude of these deficits strongly predicted the magnitude of social/communicative impairments in individuals with ASDs. Thus, social/communicative impairments in ASDs may derive, at least in part, from deficits in basic perceptual-motor processes (e.g. action capability estimation). Such deficits may impair the ability to maintain and calibrate the relationship between oneself and one's social and physical environments, and present fruitful, novel, and unexplored target for intervention.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2012 · doi:10.1002/aur.1248