Studies in Perception and Action XII

Seventeenth International Conference on Perception and Action

Tehran J. Davis, Pedro Passos, Matt Dicks, Julie A. Weast-Knapp

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138146198
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134958320
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Since 1991, the edited book series Studies in Perception and Action has appeared in conjunction with the biennial International Conference of Perception and Action (ICPA). ICPA provides a forum for researchers and academics who share a common interest in ecological psychology to come together, present new research, and foster ideas towards the advancement of the field. This volume highlights research presented at the 17th ICPA meeting in the summer of 2013. The short papers and empirical articles presented in this book represent the contributions of researchers and laboratories from across the globe. The reader will find new, cutting-edge research on a wide variety of topics in perception and action. This volume will especially appeal to those that are interested in James J. Gibson's ecological approach to psychology, as well as, more broadly, students and researchers of visual and haptic perception, perceptual development, human movement dynamics, human factors, and social processes.

Chapter 1:
Action & Coordination

Is Social Competence a Multi-Dimensional Construct? Motor and Cognitive Components in Autism

Paula Fitzpatrick¹, Veronica Romero², Joseph Amaral², Michael J. Richardson², & R. C. Schmidt³

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit numerous impairments in social interaction that impede mental and physical development, learning, and behavioral functioning (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Children with ASD have particular difficulty coordinating thoughts and ideas with others (social cognitive coordination), but the specific processes underlying such impairments are not yet understood. An important key for increasing our understanding of ASD-specific social deficits may lie within the movement coordination that takes place within a social context. When human beings interact with others, we implicitly coordinate our bodies and this involves motor, perceptual, attentional, and social processes.

Research evidence regarding the underlying mechanisms responsible for the social competence deficit in ASD are often contradictory and at odds with the fact that individuals with ASD have very real problems in naturalistic social situations even if they are able to successfully perform experimental tasks. For example, while children with ASD have been found to perform poorly on verbal theory of mind tasks (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), research indicates they are equivalent to typically developing children in emulating the intended actions of others (Carpenter, Pennington, & Rogers, 2001) and in helping tasks (Liebal et al., 2008), suggesting perhaps that they can make inferences about another’s mental state. Klin (2000) has proposed that theory of mind tasks may not be sufficient measures of the type of social adaptation skills needed in actual social interactions, as high functioning individuals with autism performed poorly on a social attribution task despite successful completion of a theory of mind task. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that attribution of agency and mental states may not involve a singular neural system. In fact, Gobbini et al. (2007) found evidence that more cognitive assessments of theory of mind activate different brain regions than the tasks in which intentional attributions are made on the basis of perceived actions.

Here we evaluate the relationship between social motor coordination and social cognitive coordination and explore whether social competence is unidimensional or multi-dimensional. Specifically, we investigate whether dynamical measures of social motor coordination can index the type of complex social adaptation skills required in more naturalistic social exchanges that differentiate those with ASD.

Method

In the initial sample, 18 children participated in the study and comprised two groups: autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 11, mean age 76.4 months) and typically developing children (TD, n = 7, mean age 70.3 months).

We employed experimental techniques to evaluate not only traditional cognitive measures of social competence but also the dynamical structure of social coordination by analyzing the time series records of behavior. The social cognitive measures included the social-emotion and adaptive subscales from the Development Profile (a screening instrument that identifies developmental delays across 5 behavioral domains) as well as five cognitive and cooperation tests: initiating joint attention (from ESCS: Mundy et al., 2003), theory of mind (based on the Sally-Anne task developed by Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), partner orientation during the interruption period of cooperation tasks (based on Warnecken Chen, & Tomasello, 2006), intentionality, as measured through a behavioral re-enactment task (Meltzoff, 1995), and turn taking.

The social motor coordination task consisted of a battery of action sequences that was either completed as an imitative exchange (experimenter demonstrated and then the child imitated) or a synchrony exchange (the child performed the actions with the experimenter). The same experimenter performed all the experimental testing sessions and was not blind to participant group. As for an index of social motor coordination, the distributions of relative phase angles formed between the activity time series of the experimenter and child were calculated and the percentages that the participants were in the dominant regions for imitation or synchronization (i.e., either the 141–160° and 161–180° regions for imitation or the 0–20° and 21–40° regions for synchronization) were used. Since imitation is an alternation in time of activity we expected relative phasing near 180° and synchronization would result in an inphase coordination pattern with relative phasing near 0°.

Results and Discussion

A 2 x 2 x 9 ANOVA with between subject variables of task (imitation or synchrony) and group (ASD, TD) and within subject variable of relative phase region was conducted on the social motor coordination data. There was a significant main effect of relative phase region [F (8,112) = 33.62, p < .001] and an interaction between relative phase region and task [F (8,112) = 52.1, p < .001]. These findings suggest that (a) both groups were able to maintain relative phasing near 180° in the imitation task; and (b) both groups demonstrated weak synchronization in the synchrony task (see Figure 1). Although the group differences were not significant, visual inspection of the data indicates that TD were slightly better than the ASD group. A larger sample may be able to better determine whether group differences exist.

Figure 1. Distribution of relative phase for the imitation (top) and synchrony (bottom) tasks.

A preliminary principal components factor analysis resulted in three factors that explained 73% of the variance. Four items, the social-emotional subscale, initiating joint attention, partner orientation during the interruption periods and the adaptive subscale, loaded onto factor 1 explained 32% of the variance. This factor seems to be indexing social attention aspects of the interactions between the participant and the experimenter. Three items, theory of mind, turn taking and social motor coordination, loaded onto factor 2 explained 24% of the variance. This factor seems to be indexing social knowledge that the participant demonstrated. The final factor was comprised of two items, the intentionality test and social motor coordination, and explained an additional 17% of the variance. This factor indexes the social actions demonstrated during social displays. What is surprising, but not unprecedented, is that the intentionality test defined a separate factor and did not load on the social knowledge factor.

These findings suggest that social coordination may not be a unitary construct, raising the possibility that there may be separate and distinct dimensions of social competence with non-shared underlying mechanisms. The process-oriented approach used here of analyzing social motor coordination holds much promise as an important means for understanding ASD-specific social deficits.

Acknowledgements. Research reported in this article was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under award number R21MH094659. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Health.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed-TR). Washington, DC: Task Force.

Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21, 37–46.

Carpenter, M., Pennington, B., & Rogers, S. (2001). Understanding of others’ intentions in children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31, 589–599.

Gobbini, M., Koralek, A. C., Bryan, R. E., Montgomery, K. J., & Haxby, J. V. (2007). Two takes on the social brain: A comparison of theory of mind tasks. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1803–1814.

Liebal, K., Colombi, C., Rogers, S., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Helping and cooperation in children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Discord, 38, 224–238.

Klin, A. (2000). Attributing social meaning to ambiguous visual stimuli in higher-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome: The Social Attribution Task. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 41, 831–846.

Meltzoff, A. N. (1995). Understanding the intentions of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children. Developmental Psychology, 31, 838–850.

Mundy, P., Delgado, C., Block, J., Venezia, M., Hogan, A., & Seibe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Meeting History
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Action & Coordination
• Chapter 2: Interpersonal Coordination
• Chapter 3: Perception and Perceptual-Motor Learning
• Chapter 4: Perception of Affordances
• Chapter 5: Postural Control and Coordination
• Author Index
• Keyword Index