Intact recognition, but attenuated adaptation, for biological motion in youth with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Given the ecological importance of biological motion and its relevance to social cognition, considerable effort has been devoted over the past decade to studying biological motion perception in autism. However, previous studies have asked observers to detect or recognize briefly presented human actions placed in isolation, without spatial or temporal context. Research on typical populations has shown the influence of temporal context in biological motion perception: prolonged exposure to one action gives rise to an aftereffect that biases perception of a subsequently displayed action. Whether people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show such adaptation effects for biological motion stimuli remains unknown. To address this question, this study examined how well youth with ASD recognize ambiguous actions and adapt to recently-observed actions. Compared to typically-developing (TD) controls, youth with ASD showed no differences in perceptual boundaries between actions categories, indicating intact ability in recognizing actions. However, children with ASD showed weakened adaptation to biological motion. It is unlikely that the reduced action adaptability in autism was due to delayed developmental trajectory, as older children with ASD showed weaker adaptation to actions than younger children with ASD. Our results further suggest that high-level (i.e., action) processing weakens with age for children with ASD, but this change may be accompanied by a potentially compensatory mechanism based on more involvement of low-level (i.e., motion) processing. Autism Res 2016, 9: 1103-1113. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Adaptation to the Speed of Biological Motion in Autism

“…Atypicalities in perceptual adaptation have been thought to reflect difficulties of autistic 1 individuals in deriving or using prior knowledge representations accrued from recent sensory experiences (Pellicano and Burr 2012). Within the Bayesian inference, or predictive-coding theoretical frameworks, which, in broad terms, suggest that the brain continually exploits the statistics of the world to predict current sensory input using a hierarchical and bidirectional processing system which aims to minimise prediction error within a cascade of cortical processing (Clark 2013;Friston 2010), adaptation may relate to the atypical encoding of precision in the perceptual hierarchy in autism (Lawson et al 2014) or the inability to process flexibly prediction errors (Van de Cruys et al 2014).…”

“…With regard to social stimuli, attenuated adaptation in autism has been observed consistently within the face-processing domain, including, for example, for facial identity in autistic children (Ewing et al 2013b;Pellicano et al 2007) and relatives of autistic children (Fiorentini et al 2012), for facial configuration (Ewing et al 2013a, b) and eye-gaze direction in children (Pellicano et al 2013) and adults (Lawson et al 2018), and for emotional expressions in children (Rhodes et al 2018) and adults (Rutherford et al 2012). van Boxtel et al (2016 also found that autistic children show reduced adaptation to action discrimination in biological motion (walking vs. running).…”

The light-from-above prior is intact in autistic children

“…There is now considerable evidence for reduced adaptation in autism for high-level visual attributes, both social stimuli (e.g., faces: Pellicano, Jeffery, Burr, & Rhodes, 2007; biological motion: van Boxtel, Dapretto, & Lu, 2016) and nonsocial stimuli (e.g., numerosity: Turi et al, 2015), as well as for other sensory modalities (e.g., touch: Tommerdahl, Tannan, Holden, & Baranek, 2008; audition: Lawson, Aylward, White, & Rees, 2015); audiovisual calibration: Turi, Karaminis, Pellicano, & Burr, 2016). …”

Adults with autism spectrum disorder are sensitive to the kinematic features defining natural human motion

“…However, these studies should not be taken to reflect that all perceptual processing of others' actions is intact in autism. Recent evidence suggests that individuals with autism struggle with spatial-temporal integration [van Boxtel et al, 2016] and prediction (von der Lühe et al, 2016), and also when required to segregate motion signals from noise [Manning, Tibber, Charman, Dakin, & Pellicano, 2015]. Therefore, despite sensitivity to the relevant biological kinematic signals within others' actions at a "local" level, autistic individuals may have difficulty processing motion signals with a number of elements due to challenges combining cues-which vary in phase and kinematics-across space into a coherent signal (see also Dakin & Frith, 2005).…”