Visual recognition of biological motion is impaired in children with autism.
Autistic children and typically developing control children were tested on two visual tasks, one involving grouping of small line elements into a global figure and the other involving perception of human activity portrayed in point-light animations. Performance of the two groups was equivalent on the figure task, but autistic children were significantly impaired on the biological motion task. This latter deficit may be related to the impaired social skills characteristic of autism, and we speculate that this deficit may implicate abnormalities in brain areas mediating perception of human movement.
Blake
Randolph
R
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37201, USA. randolph.blake@vanderbilt.edu
Turner
Lauren M
LM
Smoski
Moria J
MJ
Pozdol
Stacie L
SL
Stone
Wendy L
WL
D001288:Attention; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010466:Perceptual Closure; D011340:Problem Solving; D011601:Psychophysics; D012016:Reference Values; D012919:Social Behavior