Evaluating the importance of social motor synchronization and motor skill for understanding autism.
Paula Fitzpatrick, Veronica Romero, Joseph L Amaral and 4 others
PMID 28590041WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism matched an experimenter's movements less closely and made drumming movements slower and more variable than controls.
The study did not test treatment.
Key findings
01Children with autism had lower coherence scores (.56) than controls (.70) across the social motor battery.
02In the hand-clapping game, children with autism had lower coherence scores (.84) than controls (.93).
03During single-handed drumming, children with autism had a longer movement period (.88 versus .76) and higher timing variability (.50 versus .20) and amplitude variability (.78 versus .60).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
This was a group comparison, not a treatment study, so it cannot show that practising synchronization improves social skills or daily function. The children had language and cognitive scores in the normal range, so the results do not tell you about children with autism who have larger language or intellectual disabilities. The study did not test whether these movement measures diagnose autism or guide treatment for an individual child. The paper reports many comparisons and correlations, and no single primary outcome is named in the supplied text, so one significant association, such as hand-clapping with sentence formation, should be read cautiously. The tasks were laboratory tasks with an experimenter, not everyday social situations.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that synchronization training improves social skills in autism. This was a group comparison, not a treatment trial, so it shows a difference in measured movement timing, not an effect of therapy.