Psychology Department, Assumption College Worcester, MA, USA.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2013 Apr 8;7:21. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2013.00021. eCollection 2013.
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suffer from numerous impairments in social interaction that affect both their mental and bodily coordination with others. We explored here whether interpersonal motor coordination may be an important key for understanding the profound social problems of children with ASD. We employed a set of experimental techniques to evaluate not only traditional cognitive measures of social competence but also the dynamical structure of social coordination by using dynamical measures of social motor coordination and analyzing the time series records of behavior. Preliminary findings suggest that children with ASD were equivalent to typically developing children on many social performance outcome measures. However, significant relationships were found between cognitive social measures (e.g., intentionality) and dynamical social motor measures. In addition, we found that more perceptually-based measures of social coordination were not associated with social motor coordination. These findings suggest that social coordination may not be a unitary construct and point to the promise of this multi-method and process-oriented approach to analyzing social coordination as an important pathway for understanding ASD-specific social deficits.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童在社交互动方面存在多种障碍，这影响了他们与他人的心理和身体协调性。我们在这里探讨了人际运动协调性是否可能是理解 ASD 儿童深刻社会问题的重要关键。我们采用了一系列实验技术，不仅评估了传统的社交能力认知测量，还通过使用社交运动协调性的动力学测量以及分析行为的时间序列记录，分析了社交协调的动力学结构。初步研究结果表明，ASD 儿童在许多社交表现结果测量上与典型发育儿童相当。然而，在认知社交测量（例如，意向性）和动力学社交运动测量之间发现了显著的关系。此外，我们发现，基于感知的社交协调的更多测量与社交运动协调没有关联。这些发现表明，社交协调可能不是一个单一的结构，并指出了这种多方法和面向过程的分析社交协调的方法的前景，作为理解 ASD 特定社交缺陷的重要途径。
