The enactive mind, or from actions to cognition: lessons from autism

Abstract

Normative-IQ individuals with autism are capable of solving explicit social cognitive problems at a level that is not matched by their ability to meet the demands of everyday social situations. The magnitude of this discrepancy is now being documented through newer techniques such as eye tracking, which allows us to see and measure how individuals with autism search for meaning when presented with naturalistic social scenes. This paper offers an approach to social cognitive development intended to address the above discrepancy, which is considered a key element for any understanding of the pathophysiology of autism. This approach, called the enactive mind (EM), originates from the emerging work on 'embodied cognitive science', a neuroscience framework that views cognition as bodily experiences accrued as a result of an organism's adaptive actions upon salient aspects of the surrounding environment. The EM approach offers a developmental hypothesis of autism in which the process of acquisition of embodied social cognition is derailed early on, as a result of reduced salience of social stimuli and concomitant enactment of socially irrelevant aspects of the environment.

Infant viewing of social scenes is under genetic control and is atypical in autism

“…Similar notions have been advanced in phenotypic studies contrasting the experiential development of children with autism and their typically-developing peers 30 , yet never heretofore demonstrated as having directly traceable genetic influence. Inherent to the classic twin design is the fact that interactions between genetic and unmeasured environmental factors will be subsumed under the category of additive genetic influence.…”

Interaction takes two: Typical adults exhibit mind-blindness towards those with autism spectrum disorder.

“…It has therefore been proposed that perception of such movement cues is the initial step required for a whole host of socio-cognitive processes, including theory of mind, which enable rapid and appropriate responses to others (Klin, Jones, Schultz, & Volkmar, 2003).…”

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…The proposition that autistic symptoms might have roots in motor dysfunction has been made before in slightly different guises, by authors who have linked motor deficits to a range of cognitive and social impairments (Bo et al, 2016;Donnellan et al, 2013;Klin et al, 2003;Leary & Hill, 1996;McCleery et al, 2013;Mostofsky & Ewen, 2011;Rizzolatti & Fabbri-Destro, 2010) e and so in part we attempt here to build upon and extend this action perception deficit perspective and its neurocognitive consequences. Klin et al (2003) emphasised the grounding of social and cognitive processes in sensorimotor experience and suggested that this differed in autism, but did not strongly highlight the neurobiological architecture necessary for this 'grounding' or 'embodiment', nor base their account on neurobiological evidence from ASC.…”

“…Klin et al (2003) emphasised the grounding of social and cognitive processes in sensorimotor experience and suggested that this differed in autism, but did not strongly highlight the neurobiological architecture necessary for this 'grounding' or 'embodiment', nor base their account on neurobiological evidence from ASC. A putative neurobiological substrate for embodied cognition and autistic symptoms was introduced in the original 'broken mirrors' hypothesis (Ramachandran & Oberman, 2006), which was later expanded by Rizzolatti and Fabbri-Destro (2010); these authors speak of impairments to mirror neuron systems, implying dysfunction of the link between perception and action.…”

“…These authors produced a radical but little noticed reimaging of the 'autistic triad'. Their thesis received little support in the 1990s but was followed by consideration of an 'enactive mind' approach by Klin, Jones, Schultz, and Volkmar (2003), according to which "… social cognitive processes emerge only from recurrent sensorimotor patterns that allow action to be perceptually guided" (p. 350). With reference to a vast array of eye-tracking data, these authors suggested that, in ASC, 'disembodied' routes are taken for generating social responses instead of the normal 'embodied' pathways, hence their unnatural and often inappropriate quality, and that this might result from a lack of salience to social stimuli from very early life.…”