Dissociation between executed and imagined bimanual movements in autism spectrum conditions.
Autistic learners may move fine yet still fail at mental practice—give them real reps before asking them to imagine.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Piedimonte et al. (2018) asked adults with autism and typical adults to do two things. First, they moved both hands at the same time in a set pattern. Second, they only imagined doing the same hand moves without moving.
The team used motion cameras and computer tests to see if the autism group could picture the moves in their mind. They wanted to know if real-hand skill and mind-only skill matched.
What they found
Both groups moved their hands together equally well. Yet the autism group scored much lower when they had to imagine the moves. The gap was biggest in the adults.
In short, real bimanual skill stayed intact, but the mind’s rehearsal of that skill was weak.
How this fits with other research
Chen et al. (2018) ran a similar 2018 study with teens. They also found slower, weaker motor imagery in autism, even though the task was a simple hand rotation. Together the two papers show the imagery gap is real across ages and tasks.
McAuliffe et al. (2017) looked one year earlier at children doing real moves. They saw big trouble when kids had to do several gestures at once. Alessandro’s 2018 adult data now show the trouble starts even before movement—inside the imagination step.
Milgramm et al. (2021) later tracked six-year-olds doing peg boards. They found shaky planning and extra wiggle in the actual moves. The 2018 imagery paper helps explain why: the mental blueprint is already fuzzy, so the real action comes out messy.
Why it matters
If a client can’t picture the move, saying “just imagine it” won’t help. Break the action into tiny real steps first, then let the client feel each part. Use mirrors, video, or hand-over-hand so the body learns before the mind rehearses.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
UNLABELLED: Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are characterized by social-communicative deficits and repetitive stereotyped behaviors. Altered motor coordination is also observed and a dysfunction of motor imagery has been recently reported on implicit tasks. However, no information on explicit motor imagery abilities is available in ASC. Here, we employed a spatial bimanual task to concurrently assess motor coordination and explicit motor imagery in autism. A secondary objective of the study was to evaluate these abilities across two populations of ASC, namely adolescents and adults with ASC. To this aim, we took advantage of the circles-lines task in which where participants were asked to continuously draw: right hand lines (unimanual condition); right hand lines and left hand circles (bimanual condition); right hand lines while imagining to draw left hand circles (imagery condition). For each participant, an Ovalization Index (OI) was calculated as a deviation of the right hand drawing trajectory from an absolute vertical axis. Results showed a significant and similar coupling effect in the bimanual condition (i.e., a significant increase of the OI values with respect to the unimanual condition) in both controls and ASC participants. On the contrary, in the imagery condition, a significant coupling effect was found only in controls. Furthermore, adult controls showed a significantly higher imagery coupling effect in comparison to all the other groups. These results demonstrate that atypical motor imagery processes in ASC are not limited to implicit tasks and suggest that development of neural structures involved in motor imagery are immature in ASC. Autism Res 2018, 11: 376-384. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are characterized by social-communicative and motor coordination difficulties but in many cases also by an impaired capability to imagine movements. In this study we found that while two handed coordination in ASC can be developed as well as in typically developed persons, the development of motor imagery could still be immature in ASC, leading to difficulties in imagining, understanding as well as programming and coordinating complex movements.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2018 · doi:10.1002/aur.1902