Development of motion processing in children with autism

Abstract

Recent findings suggest that children with autism may be impaired in the perception of biological motion from moving point-light displays. Some children with autism also have abnormally high motion coherence thresholds. In the current study we tested a group of children with autism and a group of typically developing children aged 5 to 12 years of age on several motion perception tasks, in order to establish the specificity of the biological motion deficit in relation to other visual discrimination skills. The first task required the recognition of biological from scrambled motion. Three quasi-psychophysical tasks then established individual thresholds for the detection of biological motion in dynamic noise, of motion coherence and of form-from-motion. Lastly, individual thresholds for a task of static perception--contour integration (Gabor displays)--were also obtained. Compared to controls, children with autism were particularly impaired in processing biological motion in relation to any developmental measure (chronological or mental age). In contrast, there was some developmental overlap in ability to process other types of visual motion between typically developing children and the children with autism, and evidence of developmental change in both groups. Finally, Gabor display thresholds appeared to develop typically in children with autism.

Right Temporoparietal Gray Matter Predicts Accuracy of Social Perception in the Autism Spectrum

“…This discrepancy is in accordance with growing evidence that, while common in ASD, abnormalities in motion perception are not universal and may affect only sub-types of individuals with the condition (e.g. Milne et al 2006;Annaz et al 2010).…”

“…Impairment of this integration has indeed been reported in ASD (Spencer et al 2000;Milne et al 2002;Pellicano et al 2005;Milne et al 2006;Tsermentseli et al 2008;Atkinson 2009). In addition, individuals with ASD show deficits in the discrimination of biological motion (Blake et al 2003;Parron et al 2008;Klin et al 2009;Annaz et al 2010) and in the recognition of emotions from body movements (Hubert et al 2007;Atkinson 2009), both often tested with "point-light displays" (PLDs) of actions (Johansson 1973). The ability to extract social information from PLDs is an indication that complex social cognition can be performed on the basis of basic perceptual input (Adolphs, 2003), and thus, reduced sensitivity to PLDs of emotions has often been taken as evidence for compromised social functioning in ASD.…”

Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Do Not Preferentially Attend to Biological Motion

“…There is no guarantee that an impairment observed early in childhood is necessarily obvious in later childhood or adulthood. For example, we have recently shown that there are no behavioural differences between a group of adolescents with ASD and typically developing controls on a test of biological motion perception, even though the same test revealed significant differences between younger ASD and typically developing controls (Annaz, et al 2010;Jones, et al, Submitted). Further experiments will be needed to examine whether the lack of attentional bias for biological motion is found earlier in infancy in ASD.…”

“…There is now growing evidence that children with ASD are less sensitive in their perception of briefly presented and masked biological motion point-light displays (Annaz et al 2010;Blake et al 2003;Kaiser et al 2010a, b) indexed by the increased signal to noise ratio needed for children with ASD to detect biological motion. Could a lack of preferential looking toward biological motion be the result of a less sensitive perception of the stimuli?…”

“…It is interesting then, that a number of studies now demonstrate a disruption in the perception of point-light displays of biological motion in children with ASD, either in the context of discrimination of biological motion from scrambled motion (Blake et al 2003), perception of emotion from point-light displays (Moore et al 1997), a lack of the usual perceptual advantage for point-light displays of biological motion over object motion (Kaiser et al 2010a), impaired perception of what constitutes biological motion versus mechanical motion (Cook et al 2009) or an abnormally flat developmental trajectory from 5 to 12 years in perceiving point-light biological motion embedded in noise (Annaz et al 2010). Studies measuring neural activity when viewers with ASD observe biological motion point-light displays have shown a reduction in activity in the superior temporal sulcus (STSp) (Herrington et al 2007;Kaiser et al 2010b) the area usually associated with increased activity during perception of biological motion (Lichtensteiger et al 2008;Pyles et al 2007), and an area which becomes increasingly tuned to the perception of human movement in typically developing children, but not children with ASD (Pelphrey and Carter 2008).…”