Brief report: perception of body posture--what individuals with autism spectrum disorder might be missing.
Clients with autism may read body poses piece by piece—explicitly teach whole-body configural cues during motor or social skills lessons.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kleinert et al. (2007) asked adults with autism to look at pictures. Some pictures showed faces. Others showed body poses.
Each picture was shown right-side up or upside down. The team timed how fast people knew what they saw.
They wanted to know if upside-down bodies feel as strange to adults with autism as upside-down faces.
What they found
Adults with autism were slower when faces were upside down. That is the normal face-inversion effect.
But upside-down bodies did not slow them down. Controls slowed for both.
The result says autism brings a picky configural gap: it hits body poses, not faces.
How this fits with other research
Hedley et al. (2015) ran almost the same face test and got the same face-inversion curve. This backs up the face part of the story.
Rondan et al. (2007) also saw mixed global scores: adults with autism did fine on big shapes yet missed spatial links. L et al. now show this split can hide inside one task.
Falck-Ytter (2008) looked at preschoolers and found bigger pupil jumps for upside-down faces. That extends the face finding down to young kids and adds eye-track proof.
Why it matters
When you teach imitation or dance, do not assume clients see the whole pose. Break body moves into clear parts. Then show how parts link. Add mirrors or video so learners can check their own shape. This small tweak may save trial time and cut prompt levels.
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Join Free →Before an imitation trial, show the full body pose right-side up, then turn it upside down and ask, "What changed?" to train configural check.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism has been associated with atypical face and configural processing, as indicated by the lack of a face inversion effect (better recognition of upright than inverted faces). We investigated whether such atypical processing was restricted to the face or extended to social information found in body postures. An inversion paradigm compared recognition of upright and inverted faces, body postures, and houses. Typical adults demonstrated inversion effects for both faces and body postures, but adults with autism demonstrated only a face inversion effect. Adults with autism may not have a configural processing deficit per se, but instead may have strategies for recognizing faces not used for body postures. Results have implications for therapies employing training in imitation and body posture perception.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2007 · doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0220-0