The developmental basis of visuomotor capabilities and the causal nature of motor clumsiness to cognitive and...

Motor disorders are a prominent feature of several psychiatric conditions including autism and schizophrenia. The paper extends the idea of a causal association between motor feedback and the cognitive character of the brain. First, it elaborates a detailed theory of how motor function and visual transformations are encoded as a cortical algorithm. The mechanism of motor efference copy is proposed for all forms of cognitive development. A special case of a component theory of efference copy is reconsidered with regards to the dorsal stream property of spatial awareness, in addition to its role in the formulation of motor repertoires. The spatial component of awareness within any and all sensory modalities, including proprioception itself, is compromised by the failed cerebellar contribution. This does not mean the peripheral proprioceptive signal is defective. Rather, it's an aberrant capacity of a predictive cerebellar-mediated reafference. Normally considered a feedforward output for changes in the positions of joints as part of a planned action, the proposal is for the consequences of those actions to categorize cortical networks as a feedback copy. This leads directly to higher level disorders of attention, theory of mind, and ultimately empathic insights by autistic subjects. Cognition and empathy are embodied by the process of active exploration of an organism and are dependent on the integrity of structures subserving aspects of motor behaviour. The main focus here is the cerebellum, an organ writ large in the pathophysiology of autism. What autism teaches us is that empathy is a construct of spatial awareness.