Components of person perception: An investigation with autistic, non‐autistic retarded and typically developing children and adolescents

Abstract

This study is an attempt to analyse whether there may be separable components to the human ability to perceive people as people who engage in actions and who have attitudes. We adopted the approach of developmental psychopathology. Matched groups of typically developing, autistic and non-autistic retarded (MR) children and adolescents were tested for the ability to recognize videotaped representations of 'a person', a person's actions and a person's emotion-related attitudes and allied subjective states as manifest in moving point-light images of people. Autistic and non-autistic M R participants did not differ in the ability to recognize that a person was represented in very brief exposures of a walking point-light display; autistic, M R and typically developing participants were equally able to recognize a person's actions. Non-autistic M R and typically developing participants were also similar in their propensity to notice a person's attitudes vis-2-vis the person's actions, and in their abilities to recognize actions and attitudes when specifically asked to d o so. By comparison, however, autistic participants were specifically impaired in attending to and discriminating people's attitudes and states. The results are discussed in relation to current debates on the nature of basic person-perceptual abilities that may underpin typically developing children's understanding of persons with minds ('theory of mind'). Wc also consider their relevance for controversies over the primary deficits in autism.

Brief Report: Recognition of Emotional and Non-emotional Biological Motion in Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

“…In contrast, Moore, Hobson, and Lee (1997) found similarities between children with and without autism in their basic perception of point-light displays alongside other intriguing differences. In a first experiment, they used point-light displays representing a walking human or moving objects (a rotating chair, rolling ball, moving bicycle, and a pair of scissors) to investigate the minimum exposure time required for the naı¨ve participants to recognize the point-light displays of people and familiar objects.…”

“…Results revealed that while performance in naming simple actions such as running and walking was the same for the autistic and non-autistic mentally retarded controls, the children with autism were much poorer than the control groups in spontaneously referring to emotional states in Experiment 2 and also in naming emotional and subjective states when asked to do so in Experiment 3. Taken together, the results from Moore et al (1997) suggest that sensitivity to biological motion and abilities to extract global coherence may have developed sufficiently in older autistic individuals to extract some meaning from these displays, but that there are still specific impairments in spontaneously commenting on the emotional and subjective states depicted.…”

“…Our study used a similar experimental paradigm to that of Moore et al (1997) and aimed (1) to verify whether the recognition of basic human actions in point-light displays is intact or not in adults with autism and (2) to ascertain if the perception of point-light movements expressing emotional and subjective states is specifically impaired relative to the perception of simple actions in adult participants and shows the same pattern as found by Moore et al for younger participants with autism. Note that only high functioning individuals with autism and Asperger syndrome were included in this study as it was necessary to have a reasonable level of language to be able to complete the task.…”

“…It may be that the identification task used by Moore et al makes fewer attentional demands on children with autism than the prolonged discrimination task used by Blake et al Unfortunately, as the control task used by Blake was very different from the target task, and their control group was not intelligence quotient (IQ)-comparable, it is not possible to discount effects that IQ-related information processing abilities might have had on the PLD task performance of the autistic children. Another explanation could rest in the different age range of the autistic participants in the two studies, participants being younger in the Blake et al (2003) than in the Moore et al (1997) study. It may be that the ability to recognize and discriminate between human and nonhuman point-light displays improves with age.…”

“…Whereas Moore et al (1997) used a task that required participants to identify from brief video clips an object or a person only once, Blake et al (2003) employed a task in which participants had to discriminate over many trials between 1 s clips of point-light displays of a person or a scrambled version of a display. It may be that the identification task used by Moore et al makes fewer attentional demands on children with autism than the prolonged discrimination task used by Blake et al Unfortunately, as the control task used by Blake was very different from the target task, and their control group was not intelligence quotient (IQ)-comparable, it is not possible to discount effects that IQ-related information processing abilities might have had on the PLD task performance of the autistic children.…”