School of Occupational Therapy, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, F4, No. 17, Xuzhou Rd., Zhongzheng Dist., Taipei, 100, Taiwan.
Child Developmental Assessment & Intervention Center, Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Taipei City Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2018 Mar;48(3):784-795. doi: 10.1007/s10803-017-3367-y.
Whether action representation in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is deficient remains controversial, as previous studies of action observation or imitation report conflicting results. Here we investigated the characteristics of action representation in adolescents with ASD through motor imagery (MI) using a hand rotation and an object rotation task. Comparable with the typically-developing group, the individuals with ASD were able to spontaneously use kinesthetic MI to perform the hand rotation task, as manifested by the significant biomechanical effects. However, the ASD group performed significantly slower only in the hand rotation task, but not in the object rotation task. The findings suggest that the adolescents with ASD showed inefficient but functional kinesthetic MI, implicating that their action representation might be preserved.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者的动作表现是否存在缺陷仍存在争议，因为之前关于动作观察或模仿的研究报告结果相互矛盾。在这里，我们通过手旋转和物体旋转任务的运动意象（MI）研究了 ASD 青少年的动作表现特征。与典型发育组相比，ASD 个体能够自发地使用动觉 MI 来执行手旋转任务，这表现出显著的生物力学效应。然而，只有在手旋转任务中，ASD 组的表现明显较慢，而在物体旋转任务中则没有。研究结果表明，青少年 ASD 患者表现出低效但功能正常的动觉 MI，这意味着他们的动作表现可能得到保留。
