motor representation of actions in children with autism电动机表示自闭症儿童的行为.pdfVIP

Motor Representation of Actions in Children with Autism 1 1 1 1 2 Giuseppe Cossu *, Sonia Boria , Cristiana Copioli , Roberta Bracceschi , Virginia Giuberti , Erica Santelli2, Vittorio Gallese1,3 ` ` 1 Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Universita di Parma, Parma, Italy, 2 Unita di Neuropsichiatria Infantile, AUSL Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 3 IIT (Italian Institute of Technology) Brain Center for Social and Motor Cognition, Parma, Italy Abstract Background: Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are frequently hampered by motor impairment, with difficulties ranging from imitation of actions to recognition of motor intentions. Such a widespread inefficiency of the motor system is likely to interfere on the ontogeny of both motor planning and understanding of the goals of actions, thus delivering its ultimate effects on the emergence of social cognition. Methodology/Principal Findings: We investigate the organization of action representation in 15 high functioning ASD (mean age: 8.11) and in two control samples of typically developing (TD) children: the first one, from a primary school, was matched for chronological age (CA), the second one, from a kindergarten, comprised children of much younger age (CY). We used nine newly designed behavioural motor tasks, aiming at exploring three domains of motor cognition: 1) imitation of actions, 2) production of pantomimes, and 3) comprehension of pantomimes. The findings reveal that ASD children fare significantly worse than the two control samples in each of the inspected components of the motor representation of acti