Slowing down the presentation of facial and body movements enhances imitation performance in children with severe autism.
Slow-motion video lifts imitation accuracy for some kids with severe autism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lainé et al. (2011) showed kids short clips of people moving their faces and bodies.
Some clips ran at normal speed. Others ran in slow motion.
The kids had severe autism, Down syndrome, or were neurotypical.
Staff then asked each child to copy the moves they saw.
What they found
Only the children with severe autism did better after the slow clips.
Their copied moves looked more like the model.
The other kids did about the same no matter which clip they watched.
The boost was small but clear for that one group.
How this fits with other research
Gutierrez et al. (2016) also used video to teach kids with autism. They found that adding a voice-over did not help. Together the two studies say: change the picture, not the sound.
Watson et al. (2007) used normal-speed video to grow play skills. They saw wide gains. Lainé et al. (2011) narrows the rule: slow motion only pays off for severe autism and only for imitation.
Mastrogiuseppe et al. (2015) showed that toddlers with autism already make fewer gestures. France’s slow-video trick gives one cheap way to close that early gap.
Why it matters
If you run video modeling, try a slow-motion version for clients with severe autism. Keep the clip short and the action simple. Watch if imitation gets sharper after two or three views. If it does, you have an easy tweak that costs nothing and fits most tablets.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Imitation deficits observed among individuals with autism could be partly explained by the excessive speed of biological movements to be perceived and then reproduced. Along with this assumption, slowing down the speed of presentation of these movements might improve their imitative performances. To test this hypothesis, 19 children with autism, 37 typically-developing children and 17 children with Down syndrome were asked to reproduce facial and body movements presented on a computer at a normal/ecological and two slowed down speeds. Our main result showed that a subgroup of individuals with severe autism better reproduced the movements when presented slowly than at the ecological speed. This finding opens a new window for comprehension and rehabilitation of perceptual and imitative deficits in autism.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2011 · doi:10.1007/s10803-010-1123-7