What Are You Doing With That Object? Comparing the Neural Responses of Action Understanding in Adolescents With and Without Autism.
Jennifer J Pokorny, Naomi V Hatt, Sally J Rogers and 1 others
PMID 29168088WHAT IT FOUND
Adolescents with autism and typical peers showed no difference between the groups in brain activity for conventional versus unconventional actions.
In this small fMRI study, typical peers had more social-understanding activity during conventional eating. Placing actions engaged action-observation areas in both groups.
Key findings
01No action-observation, mentalizing, or superior temporal brain areas showed significant differences between conventional and unconventional videos within either group or between the autism and typical groups.
02While watching conventional eating videos, typically developing adolescents had greater mentalizing-network activity than adolescents with autism.
03The autism group had higher social communication scores and lower motor coordination scores than the typical group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study included only 16 children and adolescents with autism and 16 typically developing children and adolescents, and 19 additional recruited participants were excluded. Participants watched the videos passively and were not asked to judge the actions or the actor’s intentions. The videos stopped before the person finished eating or placing the object, so the actions may not have seemed implausible enough to require deeper interpretation. The brain activity differences did not correlate with social communication or motor coordination scores, and the study did not test any therapy or patient outcome.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adolescents with autism understand actions differently or that this supports a therapy. The main conventionality comparisons were null, the questionnaire differences were group descriptions, and the between-group brain difference was during conventional eating in a small passive viewing study.