Biological motion perception in autism spectrum disorder: a meta-analysis.

The paper is a group comparison, not a treatment study, so it cannot show what intervention might improve biological motion perception. Publication bias was detected: Egger regression was significant, and smaller studies with larger standard errors tended to show larger effects. When study quality was included in the age and paradigm model, higher quality studies showed smaller effects. The behavioural samples had mostly average or above average IQ, so results may not transfer to autistic people with lower IQ. Diagnosis confirmation varied across studies, and the authors could not include only gold-standard diagnostic procedures. Eye-tracking, EEG and reaction-time analyses were based on few studies and produced non-significant results, so they should not be read as proof of no difference. The fMRI analysis was exploratory: the recommended threshold found no significant clusters, and the reported clusters came from a looser threshold with few studies. The fMRI analysis combined children, adolescents, adults, emotion tasks and biological motion detection tasks because too few studies allowed separate analysis. The meta-analysis excluded face motion, eye-gaze and imitation paradigms, so it speaks only to perception of human body movement.

The work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The supplied text does not report author competing-interest disclosures.

Do not conclude that autistic people universally have a fixed deficit in reading body motion. The pooled behavioural difference was medium, but it varied by age and task, the reaction-time, eye-tracking and EEG results were not significant, and publication bias and study quality suggest the average effect may be overstated.