The Motor Melody in action Planning: The Case of Autistic Children and their Non-Autistic Siblings

Abstract

Objective: it is well known that during an intentional behavior, the final goal of the action shapes the entire sequence of motor acts. This chained organization has been previously demonstrated to be altered in school-age autistic children, who modulate only the final motor act according to the action goal. Here, we investigate the temporal modulation during the intentional action in three groups of preschoolers: neurotypical, autistic, and non-autistic siblings of autistic children.

Method: the participants engaged in a simple task of reaching and grasping an object and placing it into two containers of different sizes.

Results: neurotypical children adjusted both reaching and placing times according to the width of the containers, indicating an action-chained organization. In contrast, both autistic children and non-autistic siblings adapted only the placing - but not the reaching- time according to the container size, exhibiting an unchained organization of intentional actions.

Conclusions: despite not being included among the diagnostic criteria, motor alterations are present in a large number of autistic individuals, detectable from an early age. Being motor signs also expressed by non-autistic siblings, our findings suggest a potential link between motor abnormalities and the pathogenesis of autism. Thereby, tasks similar to the one employed here could be valuable for screening children with an increased likelihood of atypical neurodevelopment.

Keywords: action planning; atypical motor developmental trajectories; endophenotype; motor abnormalities in autism; preschoolers.

Figure 1.

Experimental setting and results about the temporal organization of the action. Panel A: Schematic representation of the experimental setting; each child was instructed to place the palm of the right hand facing downwards on the table surface at the starting position and to reach, grasp, and place a cylinder into a big (Big box, sized 16 × 11.2 × 4 cm) or small (Small box, sized 7.3 × 6.5 × 4 cm) box (left inset). Panel B: The graphs report the movement duration of the three groups' reaching and placing phases; error bars indicate the standard error. Significant modulations between the Big and Small boxes (p < 0.05) are indicated on top in the corresponding color code. The table below reports for each group (TD, SIB, and AU) the means and standard deviation of movement duration (Reaching and Placing) for the Big and Small boxes. Panel C shows the scatterplots of the temporal difference (Delta) between Big and Small box durations in the reaching (x-axis) and placing (y-axis) phases for the TD, SIB, and AU groups separately. The red line indicates the significant linear trend followed by data distribution