The aim of the present study was to assess the role of action observation treatment (AOT) in the rehabilitation of upper limb motor functions in children with cerebral palsy. We carried out a two-group, parallel randomized controlled trial. Eighteen children (aged 5–11 yr) entered the study: 11 were treated children, and 7 served as controls. Outcome measures were scores on two functional scales: Melbourne Assessment of Unilateral Upper Limb Function Scale (MUUL) and the Assisting Hand Assessment (AHA). We collected functional scores before treatment (T1), at the end of treatment (T2), and at two months of follow-up (T3). As compared to controls, treated children improved significantly in both scales at T2 and this improvement persisted at T3. AOT has therefore the potential to become a routine rehabilitation practice in children with CP. Twelve out of 18 enrolled children also underwent a functional magnetic resonance study at T1 and T2. As compared to controls, at T2, treated children showed stronger activation in a parieto-premotor circuit for hand-object interactions. These findings support the notion that AOT contributes to reorganize brain circuits subserving the impaired function rather than activating supplementary or vicariating ones.
Faces convey valuable information for social cognition, effective interpersonal interaction, and non-verbal communication. Face perception is believed to be atypical in autism, but the origin of this deficit is controversial. Dominant featural face encoding is suggested to be responsible for face tuning scarcity. Here we used a recently developed Face-n-Food paradigm for studying face tuning in individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). The key benefit of these images is that single components do not explicitly trigger face processing. In a spontaneous recognition task, adolescents with autism and typically developing matched controls were presented with a set of Face-n-Food images in different degree resembling a face (slightly bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style). The set of images was shown in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. Thresholds for recognition of the Face-n-Food images as a face in ASD individuals were substantially higher than in typically developing controls: they did not report seeing a face on the images, which controls easily recognized as a face, and gave overall fewer face responses. This outcome not only lends support to atypical face tuning, but provides novel insights into the origin of face encoding deficits in autism.
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