When social and action spaces diverge: A study in children with typical development and autism.
Tool-use widens body space in autistic kids, but you must explicitly teach comfort distance.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked the kids to move wooden blocks with a long or short stick. Half were autistic, half were not.
Kids worked in pairs. They had to pass the stick and finish a tower together.
Cameras tracked how far apart they stood before and after the task.
What they found
Both groups reached farther with the long stick after practice. Their action space grew.
Only the typical kids moved closer to their partner. The autistic kids kept the same distance.
Cooperative play stretched the body map, but not the social comfort zone.
How this fits with other research
Granieri et al. (2020) saw the same split in adults. Autistic people liked autistic partners yet were still rated rougher by everyone.
Chan et al. (2021) meta-analysis shows physical games can boost social skills, but the gains are small. The new data say the space piece may need its own teaching.
Vink et al. (2019) found that kids with developmental delays need clear leader roles to stay in sync. Michela’s team now adds that space cues also need to be taught, not hoped for.
Why it matters
If you run social-skills groups, don’t assume cooperative work alone will teach personal space. After a shared task, add a quick space game: have the child take one step closer each time a peer gives a high-five. Pair the motor stretch with a social stretch.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The space around the body has been defined as action space (peripersonal space) and a social space (interpersonal space). Within the current debate about the characteristics of these spaces, here we investigated the functional properties and plasticity of action and social space in developmental age. To these aims, children with typical development and autism spectrum disorders were submitted to Reaching- and Comfort-distance tasks, to assess peripersonal and interpersonal space, respectively. Participants approached a person (confederate) or an object and stopped when they thought they could reach the stimulus (Reaching-distance task), or they felt comfortable with stimulus' proximity (Comfort-distance task). Both tasks were performed before and after a cooperative tool-use training, in which participant and confederate actively cooperated to reach tokens by using either a long (Experiment 1) or a short (Experiment 2) tool. Results showed that in both groups, peripersonal space extended following long-tool-use but not short-tool-use training. Conversely, in typical development, but not in autism spectrum disorders children, interpersonal space toward confederate reduced following the cooperative tool-use training. These findings reveal that action and social spaces are functionally dissociable both in typical and atypical development, and that action but not social space regulation is intact in children with autism.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2019 · doi:10.1177/1362361318822504