Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Autism Res. 2010 Aug;3(4):191-5. doi: 10.1002/aur.137.
Successful social behavior requires the accurate detection of other people's movements. Consistent with this, typical observers demonstrate enhanced visual sensitivity to human movement relative to equally complex, nonhuman movement [e.g., Pinto & Shiffrar, 2009]. A psychophysical study investigated visual sensitivity to human motion relative to object motion in observers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants viewed point-light depictions of a moving person and, for comparison, a moving tractor and discriminated between coherent and scrambled versions of these stimuli in unmasked and masked displays. There were three groups of participants: young adults with ASD, typically developing young adults, and typically developing children. Across masking conditions, typical observers showed enhanced visual sensitivity to human movement while observers in the ASD group did not. Because the human body is an inherently social stimulus, this result is consistent with social brain theories [e.g., Pelphrey & Carter, 2008; Schultz, 2005] and suggests that the visual systems of individuals with ASD may not be tuned for the detection of socially relevant information such as the presence of another person. Reduced visual sensitivity to human movements could compromise important social behaviors including, for example, gesture comprehension.
成功的社交行为需要准确地察觉他人的动作。与之相符的是，典型观察者相对于同样复杂的非人类动作（例如 Pinto & Shiffrar, 2009），对人类动作的视觉敏感度更高。一项心理物理学研究调查了自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者对人类运动与物体运动的视觉敏感度。参与者观看了光点人物的移动图像，并进行了比较，观看了移动拖拉机的图像，并在未掩蔽和掩蔽显示中对这些刺激的连贯和混乱版本进行了区分。参与者分为三组：有 ASD 的年轻成年人、正常发展的年轻成年人和正常发展的儿童。在所有掩蔽条件下，典型观察者对人类运动的视觉敏感度增强，而 ASD 组的观察者则没有。由于人体是一种固有的社交刺激，这一结果与社会大脑理论（例如 Pelphrey & Carter, 2008；Schultz, 2005）一致，表明 ASD 患者的视觉系统可能无法适应检测与社交相关的信息，例如另一个人的存在。对人类运动的视觉敏感度降低可能会影响重要的社交行为，例如手势理解。
