The different “reading” code of the movements of people with autism

One of the many skills we possess without realizing that we are able to guess the intentions of another person starting from visual signals coming from his movement. If we observe someone who is about to take a bottle of water on the table, we will probably be able to understand, from how he begins the gesture, if he is taking it to pour the water into a glass or to move the bottle to another place. Small differences in the gesture that allow us to understand the intentions. a skill based on the ability to identify the significant elements of the gesture and then to interpret them.

An interdisciplinary and international team made up of mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, doctors and neuroscientists from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), the Gaslini Hospital in Genoa and the University of Hamburg, has used this skill for an ingenious experiment. The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) indicate that people with autism have a specific difficulty in identifying and correctly reading the significant elements of the gestures of others. A difficulty that could at least partially explain their difficult interactions with others in the real world. But from the research it also emerged that this difficulty is present above all when the gesture performed by people without autism.

therefore as if for people with autism there was a different “writing” and “reading” code of the movements. In fact, the opposite is also true. Typically developing people, therefore not affected by autism, have difficulty in identifying and correctly reading the significant elements of the gestures of people with autism. The study took place in two stages he explains Cristina Becchio, IIT researcher and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Hamburg, who coordinated the team of researchers. In a first phase, using motion capture techniques, we videotaped actions with different intentions performed by typically developing children and children with autism. We asked them to grab a bottle and then pour water (reach to pour), or to grab the same bottle and then put it in a box (reach to put). In the second phase we used the recorded videos to study the ability of typically developing children and children with autism to read the intention expressed by movement. The children could only see the first part of the action, until they reached the bottle, and we asked them to guess the intention they observed: to pour or to move?

Although this is sophisticated laboratory research, its results provide an important key to interpreting autistic behavior and outline future prospects for intervention and possible monitoring of therapeutic approaches. What emerged from the research is important because it confirms the anecdotal observation, reported by many people with autism, according to which their social interaction difficulties relate to interaction with people with typical development, but not interaction with autistic people, says Cristina Becchio. . And it also suggests that the difficulties in social interaction are reciprocal between people with autism and people with typical development, and that therefore any intervention aimed at overcoming them must take into account not only the individual but also the people with whom he interacts, says Lino Nobili, director of Child Neuropsychiatry of the Gaslini Hospital, University of Genoa, co-author of the article on PNAS. The challenge for the future, concludes Becchio, will also be to understand if it is possible to teach people with autism to better read the intentions inherent in the actions of others. After all, a process not very different from that used at school to teach reading.