Motor atypicalities in infancy are associated with general developmental level at 2 years, but not autistic symptoms

Achermann, Sheila; Nyström, Pär; Bölte, Sven; Falck‐Ytter, Terje

doi:10.1177/1362361320918745

Cited by 13 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Several early motor measures were different in 39 HR infants in comparison with 19 controls. However, they were not related to autistic symptoms at 2 years, but to the following non-social, general development [ 51 ]. Other specific manual motor behaviors have been considered in HR individuals.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Motor Signs in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Posar

Visconti

2022

Children

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A growing number of literature data suggest the presence of early impairments in the motor development of children with autism spectrum disorder, which could be often recognized even before the appearance of the classical social communication deficits of autism. In this narrative review, we aimed at performing an update about the available data on the early motor function in children with autism spectrum disorder. Early motor impairment in these children can manifest itself both as a mere delay of motor development and as the presence of atypicalities of motor function, such as a higher rate and a larger inventory, of stereotyped movements both with and without objects. In the perspective of a timely diagnosis, the presence of early motor signs can be an important clue, especially in an individual considered at high risk for autism. Motor and communication (both verbal and non-verbal) skills are connected and a pathogenetic role of early motor dysfunctions in the development of autism can be hypothesized. From this, derives the importance of an early enabling intervention aimed at improving motor skills, which could also have favorable effects on other aspects of development.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Motor Signs in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Posar

Visconti

2022

Children

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“…This is certified by classical studies in the literature 15,16 and by the introduction in the DSM-5 of motor functioning atypicalities as an associated feature of ASD (even if -notably -they are not diagnostic criteria for ASD, see 17 ). It is also true that recent literature exploring motor functioning in infancy and childhood has not found a general consensus in ascertaining motor dysfunctions in ASD, but instead describes a complex picture of similarities and differences as compared to neurotypical controls [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vitality form expression in autism

Casartelli

Cesareo

Biffi

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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The notion of “vitality form” has been coined by Daniel Stern to describe the basic features of action, which may reflect the mood or affective state of an agent. There is general consensus that vitality forms substantiate social interactions in children as well in adults. Previous studies have explored children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)’s ability in copying and recognizing the vitality forms of actions performed by others. In this paper we investigated, for the first time, how children with ASD express different vitality forms when acting themselves. We recorded the kinematics of ASD and typically developing (TD) children while performing three different types of action with two different vitality forms. There were two conditions. In the what condition we contrasted the three different types of action performed with a same vitality form, while in the how condition we contrasted the same type of action performed with two different vitality forms. The results showed a clear difference between ASD children and TD children in the how, but not in the what, condition. Indeed, while TD children distinguished the vitality forms to be expressed by mostly varying a specific spatiotemporal parameter (i.e. movement time), no significant variation in this parameter was found in ASD children. As they are not prone to express vitality forms as neurotypical individuals do, individuals with ASD’s interactions with neurotypical peers could therefore be difficult to achieve successfully, with cascading effects on their propensity to be tuned to their surrounding social world, or so we conjecture. If this conjecture would turn out to be correct, our findings could have promising implication for theoretical and clinical research in the context of ASD.

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“…Since the model including Mullen scores did not explain the data better than the model without this predictor, we do not see evidence that differences in noise in the sensory and motor systems between the two groups influenced their performance on the task. This could be more directly analysed in future studies by recording motion tracking during the task, a method which has recently shown interesting insights into the development of autism and neurodevelopmental disorders (Achermann, Nyström, Bölte & Falck-Ytter, 2020;Caruso et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit Learning in Three-Year-Olds with High and Low Likelihood of Autism Shows No Evidence of Precision Weighting Differences

Ward¹,

Buitelaar²,

Hunnius³

2020

Preprint

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Predictive Processing accounts of autism claim that autistic individuals assign higher precision to their prediction errors than non-autistic individuals, that is, autistic individuals update their predictions more readily when faced with unexpected sensory input. Since setting the level of precision is a fundamental part of perception and learning, we propose that such differences should be detectable in various domains at a very early age, before clinical symptoms have fully emerged. We therefore tested 3-year-old younger siblings of autistic children, with a high likelihood of later receiving an autism diagnosis themselves, and low-likelihood children with an older sibling without autism. We used a novel implicit learning paradigm to examine the effect of sensory noise on the predictions participants built. In order to learn a sequence, our participants had to select which visual information to attend to and disregard low-level prediction errors caused by the sensory noise, which the theory claims is more difficult for autistic individuals. Contrary to the proposed higher precision-weighting of prediction errors in autism, the high-likelihood children did not show signs of updating their predictions more readily when we added sensory noise compared to the low-likelihood children, either in their reaction times or in the recurrence and determinism of their response locations. These results raise challenges for Predictive Processing theories of autism, specifically for the notion that prediction errors are inflexibly highly weighted by individuals with autism.

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Motor atypicalities in infancy are associated with general developmental level at 2 years, but not autistic symptoms

Cited by 13 publications

References 73 publications

Early Motor Signs in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Early Motor Signs in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Vitality form expression in autism

Implicit Learning in Three-Year-Olds with High and Low Likelihood of Autism Shows No Evidence of Precision Weighting Differences

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