Adults with autism spectrum disorder are sensitive to the kinematic features defining natural human motion.
Adults with autism see body motion fine; social issues lie in interpreting what the motion means.
01Research in Context
What this study did
De Meo-Monteil et al. (2019) asked adults with autism to watch stick-figure lights that moved like real people.
The team wanted to know if these adults could spot tiny changes in speed and joint angles.
They ran two lab tests and compared scores to neurotypical adults of the same age.
What they found
Adults with autism spotted the motion tweaks just as well as their peers.
There was no group gap on basic seeing of how bodies move.
How this fits with other research
Annaz et al. (2012) saw the opposite: preschoolers with autism ignored the same light figures.
The clash is about age, not truth. Little kids may need years of social input before the brain wires up this skill.
Hubert et al. (2007) bridges the gap. They showed adults with autism can name actions but miss the feelings carried by the motion.
Put together, the picture is: basic motion detection matures by adulthood, but reading emotion from that motion stays tricky.
Why it matters
Stop assuming every social struggle in adults with autism comes from broken motion perception.
If your client avoids handshakes or team sports, target interpretation and emotion rules, not just "look at the body" drills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
It has been hypothesized that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (hereafter "autism") have problems perceiving biological motion, which contributes to their social difficulties. However, the ability to perceive the kinematic profile characteristic of biological motion has not been systematically examined in autism. To examine this basic perceptual ability we conducted two experiments comparing adults with autism with matched typical adults. In Experiment 1, participants indicated whether two movements-which differed in the quantity of formula-generated biological motion-were the same or different. In Experiment 2, they judged which of two movements was "less natural," where the stimuli varied in the degree to which they were a product of real movement data produced by autistic and typical models. There were no group differences in perceptual sensitivity in either experiment, with null effects supported by Bayesian analyses. The findings from these two experiments demonstrate that adults with autism are sensitive to the kinematic information defining biological motion to a typical degree-they are both able to detect the perceptual information in a same-different judgment, and as inclined to categorize biological motion derived from real models as natural. These findings therefore provide evidence against the hypothesis that individuals with autism exhibit low-level difficulties in perceiving the kinematics of others' actions, suggesting that atypicalities arise either when integrating this kinematic information with other perceptual input, or in the interpretation of kinematic information. Autism Res 2019, 12: 284-294 © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: It has previously been suggested that autistic children and adults have problems perceiving the detailed manner in which others move-that is, the subtle changes in speed as we move from point to point-which may impact on their ability to learn from, and about, others in a typical fashion. However, the results from the present two studies demonstrate that adults with autism can perceive this information, suggesting that atypicalities in processing others' movement may arise mainly as a consequence of atypical interpretation rather than perception.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2019 · doi:10.1002/aur.2052