Autistic traits in neurotypical adults are related to impaired perceptual–motor coordination

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are more prone to injury due to falls or collisions with objects. This may be caused by impaired perceptual–motor coordination, including inaccurate body-related spatial perception and insufficient anticipatory motor planning due to a detail-focused processing style. To investigate this hypothesis, an action-selection task was developed to create conditions likely to induce collisions with obstacles and to assess perceptual accuracy and predictive attentional properties for the action selection of subsequent movements in a sequence of actions. Sixteen participants completed an autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) survey and the task. Results indicated that AQ correlated significantly with body-related spatial perception, and it was a significant predictor of the number of collisions. For the association between collisions and the eye-tracking data, results of a generalized linear mixed model showed that collisions were more likely to happen when the total fixation time to exit width was short and when the time to first fixation was late. This suggests that participants with higher autistic traits were not able to properly plan subsequent movements. Overall, these findings suggested that impaired perceptual–motor coordination, which could occur due to difficulties in perceiving body-related spatial relationships and anticipatory motor planning, may underlie the high susceptibility to injury observed in individuals with ASD.