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Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Brief report: imitation of meaningless gestures in individuals with Asperger syndrome and High-Functioning Autism
Heidi Stieglitz Ham1, Martin Corley, Gnanathusharan Rajendran
1Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, UK. heidi.ham@ed.ac.uk
Abstract:
Nineteen people with Asperger syndrome (AS)/High-Functioning Autism (HFA) (ages 7-15) were tested on imitation of two types of meaningless gesture: hand postures and finger positions. The individuals with AS/HFA achieved lower scores in the imitation of both hand and finger positions relative to a matched neurotypical group. The between-group difference was primarily accounted for by performance on a test of visual motor integration, together with a hand imitation deficit which was specifically due to errors in body part orientation. Our findings implicate both visuomotor processes (Damasio and Maurer, 1978) and self-other mapping (Rogers and Pennington, 1991) in ASD imitation deficits. Following Goldenberg (1999), we propose that difficulties with body part orientation may underlie problems in meaningless gesture imitation.
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