Lateralized Response Timing Deficits in Autism (original) (raw)
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Psychophysical Assessment of Timing in Individuals With Autism
American journal on intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2011
Perception of time, in the seconds to minutes range, is not well characterized in autism. The required interval timing system (ITS) develops at the same stages during infancy as communication, social reciprocity, and other cognitive and behavioral functions. The authors used two versions of a temporal bisection procedure to study the perception of duration in individuals with autism and observed quantifiable differences and characteristic patterns in participants' timing functions. Measures of timing performance correlated with certain autism diagnostic and intelligence scores, and parents described individuals with autism as having a poor sense of time. The authors modeled the data to provide a relative assessment of ITS function in these individuals. The implications of these results for the understanding of autism are discussed. The ability to perceive the temporal properties of events and the temporal relations between them is fundamental for adaptive learning, cognition, and behavior. Individuals are continually timing events in their surrounding environment. The ability to estimate duration (which is shared by other species) and to use such temporal knowledge to mediate expectations and behavior is at the core of adaptive function. Research has revealed that distortions and perturbations in timing ability are present, to varying degrees, in many patient populations and may accompany differences in other aspects of sensory processing and cognitive and behavioral profiles. Recently research has suggested that differences in timing and time perception might directly contribute to severity and features of autistic disorder (and the triad of impairments; Allman & DeLeon, 2009; Boucher, 2001; Wimpory, 2002). Although to date there have been very few empirical studies examining timing ability in these individuals, there are not any studies (to our knowledge) that have attempted to examine any correspondence between timing performance and autism symptom severity. In the current study, we attempted to provide a preliminary assessment of the ability of individuals with autism to estimate duration (in the multiseconds range). We also took a
Autistic Adults Show Intact Learning on a Visuospatial Serial Reaction Time Task
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical adults. The autistic group had slower overall reaction times, but demonstrated sequence-specific learning equivalent to the neurotypical group, consistent with other findings of typical procedural memory in autism. The neurotypical group, however, made significantly more prediction-related errors early in the experiment when the stimuli changed from repeated sequences to random locations, suggesting certain limited behavioural differences in the learning or utilization of predictive relationships for autistic adults.
Journal of psychiatric research, 2018
Individuals with ASD have abnormal motor and perceptual functions that do not currently form diagnostic criteria of ASD, but nevertheless may affect everyday behaviour. Temporal processing seems to be one of such non-diagnostic yet impaired domains, although the lack of systematic studies testing different aspects of timing in the same sample of participants prevents a conclusive assessment of whether there is a generalized temporal deficit in ASD associated with diagnostic symptoms. 17 children diagnosed with ASD and 18 typically developing age- and IQ-matched controls carried out a set of motor and perceptual timing tasks: free tapping, simultaneity judgment, auditory duration discrimination, and verbal duration estimation. Parents of participants filled in a questionnaire assessing the sense and management of time. Children with ASD showed faster and more variable free tapping than controls. Auditory duration discrimination thresholds were higher in the ASD group than controls in...
Generalized timing impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorders across time scales and paradigms
2017
Background: Individuals with ASD have abnormal motor and perceptual functions that do not currently form diagnostic criteria of ASD, but nevertheless may affect every day behavior. Temporal processing seems to be one of such non-diagnostic yet impaired domains, although the lack of systematic studies testing different aspects of timing in the same sample of participants prevents a conclusive assessment of whether there is a generalized temporal deficit in ASD associated with diagnostic symptoms. Methods: 17 children diagnosed with ASD and 18 typically developing age- and IQ-matched developing controls carried out a set of motor and perceptual timing tasks: free tapping, simultaneity judgment, auditory duration discrimination, and verbal time estimation. Parents of participants filled in a questionnaire assessing the sense and management of time. Results: Children with ASD showed faster and more variable free tapping than controls. Auditory duration discrimination thresholds were hig...
Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2020
Background: Objective evaluation is important to achieve an effective intervention. However, there are limited assessment tools to easily apply to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) individuals with various severities in the clinical setting. This study aimed to characterize the timing control ability of ASD individuals and clarify the relationship between timing control ability and ASD severity level in order to establish an assessment tool for ASD function. Method: We developed a simple touchscreen-based task for evaluate motor timing control ability and used two types of sensorimotor timing controls (i.e., simple timing and delayed timing tasks) in ASD (n = 77) and typically developing (TD) individuals (n = 87). Results: Each participant with ASD completed the simple timing task. Regarding the delayed timing task, two participants in the ASD group were excluded as they faced difficulties when conducting the task according to the instruction. Accuracy of motor-timing control was significantly lower in participants with ASD than in those with TD for each timing task. The mean timing error in the adaptive timing control were correlated with clinically evaluated ASD severity and participant age in the ASD group. Furthermore, receiver operating characteristic curve analysis indicated that altered motor timing control is useful for distinguishing individuals with and without ASD (area under the curve = .845). Conclusions: We showed that our assessment tool accurately assessed timing control ability of individuals with ASD, regardless of the varying ranges of symptomatic severities, and served as a useful tool for capturing the overall severity of such a heterogeneous disorder, which may lead to more effective therapies for ASD.
Journal of Autism and …, 2001
Autism and Asperger disorder have long been associated with movement abnormalities, although the neurobehavioural details of these abnormalities remain poorly defined. Clumsiness has traditionally been associated with Asperger disorder but not autism, although this is controversial. Others have suggested that both groups demonstrate a similar global motor delay. In this study we aimed to determine whether movement preparation or movement execution was atypical in these disorders and to describe any differences between autism and Asperger disorder. A simple motor reprogramming task was employed. The results indicated that individuals with autism and Asperger disorder have atypical movement preparation with an intact ability to execute movement. An atypical deficit in motor preparation was found in Asperger disorder, whereas movement preparation was characterized by a "lack of anticipation" in autism. The differences in movement preparation profiles in these disorders were suggested to reflect differential involvement of the fronto-striatal region, in particular the supplementary motor area and anterior cingulate.
Atypical Impact of Action Effect Delay on Motor Performance in Autism
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2024
Atypical sensory perception and motor impairments are primary features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that indicate atypical development and predict social and non-social challenges. However, their link is poorly understood. Sensory perception is often integrated with motor processes when a sensory effect is temporally contiguous with the motor response. Such sensory-motor coupling further improves motor behavior. Previous studies indicate alterations in sensory perception of actioneffect temporal contiguity in ASD, which bares the question of how it may impact motor performance. People diagnosed with ASD and typically developed (TD) participants performed a speeded reaction-time task previously established to capture the facilitating impact of action's perceptual effect on motor response selection. The sensitivity of this mechanism to delays in the effect was measured, manipulating the action-effect temporal contiguity in a within-subject design. An immediate action effect (compared to a No-effect condition) facilitated response selection in the TD group. This facilitation effect was evident in the ASD group but did not show the typical sensitivity to the effect delay. While in the TD group, RT was shorter in the short (225ms) compared to the long (675ms) action effect delay condition, this distinguished pattern was absent in the ASD group. The findings provide supporting evidence that atypical motor performance in ASD results, at least in part, from an altered sensory perception of action effect temporal contiguity. We discuss the results in light of the reduced perceptual specialization account in ASD and its potential for undermining adaptive sensorimotor processes.
Children with autism spectrum disorder show increased sensitivity to time-based predictability
International Journal of Developmental Disabilities
Objectives: We studied timed-based expectancy as well as general perceptual-motor speed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Methods: In Experiment 1, 11 children with ASD and 11 typically developing children (TD) (6-13 years) completed a binary choice response task in which foreperiod duration predicted the response target's location with a probability of 0.8. In Experiment 2, we compared performance between 10 children with ASD (6-11 years) and 10 TD children by using a simple reaction time test. Results: Employing a binary forced choice task where the duration of a pre-target interval (800 or 1400 ms) probabilistically predicted the target, we found that children with ASD were sensitive to the temporal regularity, whereas TD children were not. Children with ASD were faster for expected combinations of interval and target location but they were also less accurate for those combinations. Results from an additional simple reaction time test indicate that the development of general perceptual-motor processes was delayed in children with ASD. However, the ability for children with ASD to form time-based expectancies was not correlated with their performance in the simple reaction time test. Conclusion: Children with ASD show significantly greater sensitivity towards time-based predictability than TD children. However, the development of general perceptual-motor processes was impaired in children with ASD.
Diminished neural resources allocation to time processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders
NeuroImage. Clinical, 2018
Interval timing, the ability to judge the duration of short events, has been shown to be compromised in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Timing abilities are ubiquitous and underlie behaviours as varied as sensory integration, motor coordination or communication. It has been suggested that atypical temporal processing in ASD could contribute to some of the disorder's symptoms, in particular motor clumsiness and difficulties in social interaction and communication. Recent behavioural investigations have suggested that interval timing in ASD is characterised by intact sensitivity but reduced precision in duration judgements. In this study we investigated the processing of duration as compared to pitch in a group of high-functioning individuals with ASD using magnetoencephalography (MEG). 18 adolescents and adults with ASD and 18 age- and IQ-matched typically-developing control (TDC) individuals compared two consecutive tones according to their duration or pitch in separate experim...
Evidence that the pattern of visuomotor sequence learning is altered in children with autism
Autism Research, 2008
Motor deficits are commonly reported in autism, with one of the most consistent findings being impaired execution of skilled movements and gestures. Given the developmental nature of autism, it is possible that deficits in motor/procedural learning contribute to impaired acquisition of motor skills. Thus, careful examination of mechanisms underlying learning and memory may be critical to understanding the neural basis of autism. A previous study reported impaired motor learning in children with high-functioning autism (HFA); however, it is unclear whether the observed deficits in motor learning are due, in part, to impaired motor execution and whether these deficits are specific to autism. In order to examine these questions, 153 children (52 with HFA, 39 with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 62 typically developing (TD) children) participated in two independent experiments using a Rotary Pursuit task, with change in performance across blocks as a measure of learning. For both tasks, children with HFA demonstrated significantly less change in performance than did TD children, even when differences in motor execution were minimized. Differences in learning were not seen between ADHD and TD groups on either experiment. Analyses of the pattern of findings revealed that compared with both ADHD and TD children, children with HFA showed a similar degree of improvement in performance; however, they showed significantly less decrement in performance when presented with an alternate ("interference") pattern. The findings suggest that mechanisms underlying acquisition of novel movement patterns may differ in children with autism. These findings may help explain impaired skill development in children with autism and help to guide approaches for helping children learn novel motor, social and communicative skills.