title: A perceptual-motor deficit predicts social and communicative impairments in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.
abstract: Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have known impairments in social and motor skills. Identifying putative underlying mechanisms of these impairments could lead to improved understanding of the etiology of core social/communicative deficits in ASDs, and identification of novel intervention targets. The ability to perceptually integrate one's physical capacities with one's environment (affordance perception) may be such a mechanism. This ability has been theorized to be impaired in ASDs, but this question has never been directly tested. Crucially, affordance perception has shown to be amenable to learning; thus, if it is implicated in deficits in ASDs, it may be a valuable unexplored intervention target. The present study compared affordance perception in adolescents and adults with ASDs to typically developing (TD) controls. Two groups of individuals (adolescents and adults) with ASDs and age-matched TD controls completed well-established action capability estimation tasks (reachability, graspability, and aperture passability). Their caregivers completed a measure of their lifetime social/communicative deficits. Compared with controls, individuals with ASDs showed unprecedented gross impairments in relating information about their bodies' action capabilities to visual information specifying the environment. The magnitude of these deficits strongly predicted the magnitude of social/communicative impairments in individuals with ASDs. Thus, social/communicative impairments in ASDs may derive, at least in part, from deficits in basic perceptual-motor processes (e.g. action capability estimation). Such deficits may impair the ability to maintain and calibrate the relationship between oneself and one's social and physical environments, and present fruitful, novel, and unexplored target for intervention.
authors.affiliation: Perception and Action in Virtual Environments, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany. sally.linkenauger@tuebingen.mpg.de
authors.forename: Sally A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Linkenauger
authors.forename: Matthew D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Lerner
authors.forename: Verónica C
authors.initials: VC
authors.lastname: Ramenzoni
authors.forename: Dennis R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Proffitt
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000523:psychology*; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D016555:Matched-Pair Analysis; D019957:Motor Skills Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D012917:Social Adjustment; D012938:Social Perception; D013028:Space Perception; D014796:Visual Perception