Cannon Jonathan, Cardinaux Annie, Bungert Lindsay, Li Cindy, Sinha Pawan
Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
Department of Brain & Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Heliyon. 2024 Jul 6;10(14):e34261. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e34261. eCollection 2024 Jul 30.
Recent results suggest that autistic individuals exhibit reduced accuracy compared to non-autistic peers in temporally coordinating their actions with predictable external cues, e.g., synchronizing finger taps to an auditory metronome. However, it is not yet clear whether these difficulties are driven primarily by motor differences or extend into perceptual rhythmic timing tasks. We recruited autistic and non-autistic participants for an online study testing both finger tapping synchronization and continuation as well as rhythmic time perception (anisochrony detection). We fractionated each participant's synchronization results into parameters representing error correction, motor noise, and internal time-keeper noise, and also investigated error-correcting responses to small metronome timing perturbations. Contrary to previous work, we did not find strong evidence for reduced synchronization error correction. However, we found compelling evidence for noisier internal rhythmic timekeeping in the synchronization, continuation, and perceptual components of the experiment. These results suggest that noisier internal rhythmic timing processes underlie some sensorimotor coordination challenges in autism.
近期研究结果表明，与非自闭症同龄人相比，自闭症患者在根据可预测的外部线索进行动作的时间协调时，准确性较低，例如，将手指敲击与听觉节拍器同步。然而，目前尚不清楚这些困难主要是由运动差异导致的，还是会延伸到感知节奏计时任务中。我们招募了自闭症和非自闭症参与者进行一项在线研究，测试手指敲击同步与延续以及节奏时间感知（不等时距检测）。我们将每个参与者的同步结果分解为代表误差校正、运动噪声和内部计时噪声的参数，并研究了对节拍器微小计时扰动的误差校正反应。与之前的研究不同，我们没有找到同步误差校正能力下降的有力证据。然而，我们发现了令人信服的证据，表明在实验的同步、延续和感知部分，内部节奏计时存在更大的噪声。这些结果表明，内部节奏计时过程中的更大噪声是自闭症中一些感觉运动协调挑战的基础。
