Motor and verbal perspective taking in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Changes in social interaction with people and tools.
Watching how fast a child hands over a tool can track growing social insight during a 16-week story program.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Morrison et al. (2017) ran a 16-week story program for kids with autism aged 8 to 11. Each week the kids heard short tales that talked about what people think and feel.
While the kids listened, the team watched their hands. If a child quickly handed over a tool the story character needed, the team scored that as motor perspective taking.
What they found
By week 16 the kids reached for tools faster and used more mind words like "think" and "want." The hand movements and the new words rose together.
The simple reach-and-hand action gave a live signal that social understanding was growing.
How this fits with other research
Amodeo et al. (2025) ran almost the same 16-week story lessons but added a control group. They also saw small gains in mind-reading scores, yet parents saw no change at home. The match shows the story method keeps working; the difference is that E et al. used motor moves instead of paper tests to spot change.
Marino et al. (2020) swapped the human storyteller for a small robot and still saw perspective-taking gains in younger kids. Together the three studies show the lesson content, not the speaker, drives the gain.
Myers et al. (2015) tried a pure motor-skills program in preschoolers and found better ball skills but no social boost. That result flips E et al.'s pattern: when motor work is tied to mental-state talk, social skills grow; when it is not, they do not.
Why it matters
You can copy the reach test next Monday. Place a needed tool just out of a client's reach during play. If the child quickly hands it over, you have a cheap, real-time read of perspective taking without extra paperwork. Track these micro-helps across weeks to see if your social-skills lessons stick.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulty communicating with others nonverbally, via mechanisms such as hand gestures, eye contact and facial expression. Individuals with ASD also have marked deficits in planning future actions (Hughes, 1996), which might contribute to impairments in non-verbal communication. Perspective taking is typically assessed using verbal scenarios whereby the participant imagines how an actor would interact in a social situation (e.g., Sally Anne task; Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985). METHOD: The current project evaluated motor perspective taking in five children with ASD (8-11 years old) as they participated in a narrative intervention program over the course of about 16 weeks. The goal of the motor perspective-taking task was to facilitate the action of an experimenter either hammering with a tool or putting it away. RESULTS: Initially, children with ASD facilitated the experimenter's action less than neurotypical control children. As the narrative intervention progressed, children with ASD exhibited increased motor facilitation that paralleled their increased use of mental state and causal language, indicating a link between verbal and motor perspective taking. CONCLUSIONS: Motoric perspective taking provides an additional way to assess understanding and communication in children with ASD and may be a valuable tool for both early assessment and diagnosis of children with ASD.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2017 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2017.02.017