Table 1 - uploaded by Derek Graham Moore
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List of the actions, subjective states, emotional states, and objects used (see Moore et al. 1997 for detailed descriptions)
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This study aimed to explore the perception of different components of biological movement in individuals with autism and Asperger syndrome. The ability to recognize a person's actions, subjective states, emotions, and objects conveyed by moving point-light displays was assessed in 19 participants with autism and 19 comparable typical control partic...
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Context 1
... and stimuli were similar to those used in Moore et al. (1997, Experiments 2 and 3). Stimuli were video clips each of 5 s duration showing dynamic point-lights displays of an actor performing 10 actions, five sub- jective states, and five emotional actions (see Table 1). Five movies of manipulated point-light displays of objects were also presented. ...
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Citations
... Annaz et al., 2010;Koldewyn et al., 2010;Nackaerts et al., 2012;Price et al., 2012; no group differences: e.g. Cusack et al., 2015;Hubert et al., 2007;Saygin et al., 2010;Wright et al., 2014), three recent meta-analyses summarizing the literature all concluded that biological motion perception is diminished in autism (Federici et al., 2020;Todorova et al., 2019;van der Hallen et al., 2019). However, the three meta-analyses also found high heterogeneity between studies, at least part of which is thought to be due to variations in the type of stimuli used to investigate biological motion perception (Federici et al., 2020;van der Hallen et al., 2019). ...
... Overall, there are methodological differences that may give rise to those contradictions [47]. There is no consistent definition of BMP tasks, e.g., meaningfulness of observed motion [48], self-executed vs. observed or imagined motion [49], human vs. non-human motion, or active vs. passive motion recognition [50]. ...
... Metacognitive operations pertaining to others' motion observation represented by MNS structures and self-referencing has been associated with ToM activity previously, potentially enabling social-communicative actions [115]. Analogously, performance in biological motion tasks is impaired only in response to higherorder emotion recognition but not basic perception (e.g., [47,116]). For the present results, this implies that separate but intact networks for form and motion seem to be evident in ASD. ...
Objective: Biological motion perception (BMP) correlating with a mirror neuron system (MNS) is attenuated in underage individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While BMP in typically-developing controls (TDCs) encompasses interconnected MNS structures, ASD data hint at segregated form and motion processing. This coincides with less fewer long-range connections in ASD than TDC. Using BMP and electroencephalography (EEG) in ASD, we characterized directionality and coherence (mu and beta frequencies). Deficient BMP may stem from desynchronization thereof in MNS and may predict social-communicative deficits in ASD. Clinical considerations thus profit from brain–behavior associations. Methods: Point-like walkers elicited BMP using 15 white dots (walker vs. scramble in 21 ASD (mean: 11.3 ± 2.3 years) vs. 23 TDC (mean: 11.9 ± 2.5 years). Dynamic Imaging of Coherent Sources (DICS) characterized the underlying EEG time-frequency causality through time-resolved Partial Directed Coherence (tPDC). Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification validated the group effects (ASD vs. TDC). Results: TDC showed MNS sources and long-distance paths (both feedback and bidirectional); ASD demonstrated distinct from and motion sources, predominantly local feedforward connectivity, and weaker coherence. Brain–behavior correlations point towards dysfunctional networks. SVM successfully classified ASD regarding EEG and performance. Conclusion: ASD participants showed segregated local networks for BMP potentially underlying thwarted complex social interactions. Alternative explanations include selective attention and global–local processing deficits. Significance: This is the first study applying source-based connectivity to reveal segregated BMP networks in ASD regarding structure, cognition, frequencies, and temporal dynamics that may explain socio-communicative aberrancies.
... Annaz et al., 2010;Koldewyn et al., 2010;Nackaerts et al., 2012;Price et al., 9 2012; no group differences: e.g. Cusack et al., 2015;Hubert et al., 2007;Saygin et al., 2010;10 Wright et al., 2014), three recent meta-analyses summarizing the literature all confirmed that 11 biological motion perception is diminished in autism (Federici et al., 2020;Todorova et al., 12 2019;van der Hallen et al., 2019). However, the three meta-analyses also found high 13 heterogeneity between studies, at least part of which is thought to be due to variations in the 14 type of stimuli used to investigate biological motion perception (Federici et al., 2020;van der 15 All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, were proficient in Dutch,3 reported no known neurological condition, had not sought professional help for a mental 4 health problem in the last 6 months before participation, and scored low (≤ 2) or high (≥ 6) on 5 the autism-spectrum quotient-10 (AQ-10; Allison et al., 2012). ...
The perception of biological motion is an important social cognitive ability. Models of biological motion perception recognize two processes that contribute to the perception of biological motion: a bottom-up process that binds optic-flow patterns into a coherent percept of biological motion and a top-down process that binds sequences of body-posture "snapshots" over time into a fluent percept of biological motion. The vast majority of studies on autism and biological motion perception have used point-light figure stimuli, which elicit biological motion perception predominantly via bottom-up processes. Here, we investigated whether autism is associated with deviances in the top-down processing of biological motion. For this, we tested a sample of adults scoring low vs high on autism traits on a recently validated EEG paradigm in which apparent biological motion is combined with frequency tagging (Cracco et al., 2022) to dissociate between two percepts: 1) the representation of individual body postures, and 2) their temporal integration into movements. In contrast to our hypothesis, we found no evidence for a diminished temporal body posture integration in the high-scoring group. We did, however, find a group difference that suggests that adults scoring high on autism traits have a visual processing style that focuses more on a single percept (i.e. either body postures or movements, contingent on saliency) compared to adults scoring low on autism traits who instead seemed to represent the two percepts included in the paradigm in a more balanced manner. Although unexpected, this finding aligns well with the autism literature on perceptual stability(/rigidity).
... This study went further to investigate whether this local BM signal could convey emotional information and elicit corresponding pupil responses. Moreover, given that emotion perception from social signals is generally impaired in individuals with autism (Harms et al., 2010 ;Hubert et al., 2006 ), we also took the individual autistic traits into consideration by measuring the autistic tendencies in normal populations with the Autistic Quotient (AQ) questionnaire (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001 ). ...
Perceiving emotions from the movements of other biological entities is critical for human survival and interpersonal interactions. Here, we report that emotional information conveyed by point-light biological motion (BM) triggered automatic physiological responses as reflected in pupil size. Specifically, happy BM evoked larger pupil size than neutral and sad BM, while sad BM induced a smaller pupil response than neutral BM. Moreover, this happy over sad pupil dilation effect is negatively correlated with individual autistic traits. Notably, emotional BM with only local motion features retained could also exert modulations on pupils. Compared with intact BM, both happy and sad local BM evoked stronger pupil responses than neutral local BM starting from an earlier timepoint, with no difference between the happy and sad conditions. These results revealed a fine-grained pupil-related emotional modulation induced by intact BM and a coarse but rapid modulation by local BM, demonstrating multi-level processing of emotions in life motion signals. Taken together, our findings shed new light on the mechanisms underlying BM emotion processing, and highlight the potential of utilizing the emotion-modulated pupil response to facilitate the diagnosis of social cognitive disorders.
... Alternatively, limited attention to moving eyes and mouth in ASD might be determined by their insensitivity to basic face movements. As for the perception of body movement, people should first identify simple point-of-light displays of body movement, and then extract higherorder information from these displays, such as emotional content (Hubert et al., 2007;Parron et al., 2008). Attention to the communication-related face movement may also have two hierarchical levels. ...
... Considering that autistic people can usually identify simple point-of-light displays of body movement (Hubert et al., 2007), we hypothesized that biological movement would increase attention to social areas that are moving (eyes blinking and mouth moving) in comparison to attention to those areas in a static image, both for autistic and non-autistic participants. Concerning the age effect, little has been reported about changes in scanning face or biological motion in ASD compared to the non-ASD group over childhood. ...
There is a pressing need for studies of large sample sizes and variable age ranges to delineate the mechanism underlying reduced visual attention to biological motion in autism. Here we focused on the basic movement of the eyes or mouth in guiding attention. The stimuli face blinked continuously or moved the mouth silently. In a large sample (145 autistic and 132 non-autistic participants) ranging from 3 to 17 years old, we assessed whether autistic participants showed reduced visual attention to basic movement of the eyes or mouth using a free-viewing eye-tracking task. We found that, like non-autistic participants, autistic participants increased their eye-looking time when viewing the blinking face and increased mouth-looking time when viewing the mouth-moving face. Furthermore, these effects were stable across ages, suggesting the presence of a developmentally stable attentional capture by basic face movements in both groups. We also found that autistic participants looked less at basic face movement than non-autistic participants. Our results suggest that autistic children and adolescents could modulate their visual attention to the basic face movements, but their modulation effect is weaker than non-autistic participants. These results further our understanding of the mechanism underlying visual attention-to-face movement in autistic people.
... This research has revealed social processing atypicalities in autism (e.g., McPartland et al., 2011;Zilbovicius et al., 2006). Overall, however, findings have been somewhat mixed, with some studies reporting differences in, for example, biological motion processing, face processing, and processing of the eyes between individuals with and without autism (e.g., Annaz et al., 2010;Clark et al., 2008;Holt et al., 2014;Koldewyn et al., 2010;Nackaerts et al., 2012;Price et al., 2012), whereas others found no group differences (e.g., Cusack et al., 2015;Harms et al., 2010;Hubert et al., 2007;Saygin et al., 2010;Song et al., 2012;Wright et al., 2014). Typically, this research on social stimuli processing uses simple stimuli such as a single agent or even isolated body parts like faces, eyes or hands (single agent: e.g., Nijhof, Bardi, et al., 2018;Nijhof, Dhar, et al., 2018; faces: e.g., Kang et al., 2018;eyes: Holt et al., 2014hands: e.g., Raymaekers et al., 2009, Okamoto et al., 2018, often stripped from any contextual background information (i.e., put against a blank background). ...
... To explain the social difficulties in autism, a large body of research has studied social stimuli processing (e.g., a single agent: Nijhof, Bardi, et al., 2018;Nijhof, Dhar, et al., 2018; or mere body parts: Kang et al., 2018). This research has revealed social processing atypicalities in autism in, for example, biological motion processing, face processing and processing of the eyes (e.g., Annaz et al., 2010;Clark et al., 2008;Holt et al., 2014;Koldewyn et al., 2010;Nackaerts et al., 2012;Price et al., 2012; although there are also studies that found no atypicalities e.g., Cusack et al., 2015;Harms et al., 2010;Hubert et al., 2007;Saygin et al., 2010;Song et al., 2012;Wright et al., 2014). In contrast, there are, to the best of our knowledge, just a few studies that have investigated social interaction processing (Liu et al., 2018;van Boxtel et al., 2017;von der Lühe et al., 2016). ...
To explain the social difficulties in autism, many studies have been conducted on social stimuli processing. However, this research has mostly used basic social stimuli (e.g., eyes, faces, hands, single agent), not resembling the complexity of what we encounter in our daily social lives and what people with autism experience difficulties with. Third-party social interactions are complex stimuli that we come across often and are also highly relevant for social functioning. Interestingly, the existing behavioral studies point to altered social interaction processing in autism. However, it is not clear whether this is due to altered recognition or altered interpretation of social interactions. Here, we specifically investigated the recognition of social interaction in adults with and without autism. More precisely, we measured neural responses to social scenes depicting either social interaction or not with an electroencephalogram frequency tagging task and compared these responses between adults with and without autism (N = 61). The results revealed an enhanced response to social scenes with interaction, replicating previous findings in a neurotypical sample. Crucially, this effect was found in both groups, with no difference between them. This suggests that social interaction recognition is not atypical in adults with autism. Taken together with the previous behavioral evidence, our study thus suggests that individuals with autism are able to recognize social interactions, but that they might not extract the same information from those interactions or that they might use the extracted information differently.
... Affective state in ASD child [26], [107], [93], [75], [119], [120], [121], [122], [123], [124], [125], [126], [127], [128], [129], [130], 5. ...
... Throwing, jumping, kicking or moving out of phase, and scrambling were all part of activity. Similarly, B. Hubert et al. [122] sought to examined the aspects of biological motion in ASD. 19 ASD children and 19 Asperger's children participated in the study and identified emotions based on people's activities in point-light displays. ...
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), according to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders- Fifth Edition (DSM-5), is a neurodevelopmental disorder that includes deficits of social interaction and social communication with the presence of restricted/repetitive behaviors. Due to communication deficits, ASD children have difficulties in joint attention and social reciprocity. Genetic disorders and/or environmental aspects are the leading causes of ASD. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that approximately 1 among 44children in the U.S. is diagnosed with ASD. As per World Health Organization, ASD affects 14 out of every 10,000 children in Asian countries, which is approximately 23 children per 10,000 children in India. The Reported work shows that the early detection and intervention of ASD improve the language and communication deficiency of ASD children. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on various approaches to monitoring and detecting ASD children. Some monitoring and detection approaches covered in the study are clinical-based detection, MachineLearning -based ASD detection, Internet of Things (IoT)-based ASDdetection, Affective state detection, and Self Injurious Behaviour (SIB)detection of autistic children. This review also lists the several unaddressed challenges of early ASD detection. The purpose of this article is to enhance the understanding, provide guidelines for the domain, and provide insight into developing more practical and close-to-market products.
... (ii) Autistic traits and body language reading. Mounting evidence points to alterations of both BM processing and affective body language reading in ASD (Hubert et al., 2007;Freitag et al., 2008;Atkinson, 2009;Klin et al., 2009;Kaiser et al., 2010;Nackaerts et al., 2012;Pavlova, 2012;Centelles et al., 2013;Mazzoni et al., 2020Mazzoni et al., , 2021Jack et al., 2021;Sotoodeh et al., 2021; for review, see Pavlova, 2012;Barton, 2021), though intact BM processing is also reported (Murphy et al., 2009). Most important, the sensitivity to BM is inversely linked both to the severity of ASD (Blake et al., 2003) and to autistic symptomatology as measured by the autistic diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS) in adolescents (Koldewyn et al., 2010). ...
While reading covered with masks faces during the COVID-19 pandemic, for efficient social interaction, we need to combine information from different sources such as the eyes (without faces hidden by masks) and bodies. This may be challenging for individuals with neuropsychiatric conditions, in particular, autism spectrum disorders. Here we examined whether reading of dynamic faces, bodies, and eyes are tied in a gender-specific way, and how these capabilities are related to autistic traits expression. Females and males accomplished a task with point-light faces along with a task with point-light body locomotion portraying different emotional expressions. They had to infer emotional content of displays. In addition, participants were administered the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, modified and Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire. The findings show that only in females, inferring emotions from dynamic bodies and faces are firmly linked, whereas in males, reading in the eyes is knotted with face reading. Strikingly, in neurotypical males only, accuracy of face, body, and eyes reading was negatively tied with autistic traits. The outcome points to gender-specific modes in social cognition: females rely upon merely dynamic cues while reading faces and bodies, whereas males most likely trust configural information. The findings are of value for examination of face and body language reading in neuropsychiatric conditions, in particular, autism, most of which are gender/sex-specific. This work suggests that if male individuals with autistic traits experience difficulties in reading covered with masks faces, these deficits may be unlikely compensated by reading (even dynamic) bodies and faces. By contrast, in females, reading covered faces as well as reading language of dynamic bodies and faces are not compulsorily connected to autistic traits preventing them from paying high costs for maladaptive social interaction.
... For instance, the emotional faces and point-light BM stimuli, compared with the neutral counterparts, could both evoke stronger neural responses in the brain regions critically involved in social cues and emotion processing (e.g., the superior temporal sulcus; Atkinson et al., 2012;Bachmann et al., 2018;Engell & Haxby, 2007;Peelen et al., 2007;Pessoa et al., 2002;Zhu et al., 2013). Besides, the observed behavioral and neural responses to the emotional information conveyed by BMs and faces were found to be impaired in individuals with social-cognitive deficits (e.g., autism; Atkinson, 2009;Harms et al., 2010;Hubert et al., 2007;Mazzoni et al., 2022;Nackaerts et al., 2012;Okruszek, 2018;Pavlova, 2012). Furthermore, in parallel with face studies that have reported an interaction of facial expressions and other face information (Becker et al., 2007;Pourtois et al., 2010), it has been demonstrated that the emotional information of point-light displays could also modulate other aspects of BM processing (Halovic & Kroos, 2009. ...
Social directional cues (e.g., gaze direction; walking direction) can trigger reflexive attentional orienting, a phenomenon known as social attention. Here, we examined whether this reflexive social attention could be modulated by the emotional content embedded in social cues. By introducing emotional (happy and sad) biological motion (BM) stimuli to the modified central cuing paradigm, we found that the happy but not the sad emotional gait could significantly boost attentional orienting effect relative to the neutral gait. Critically, this "happiness advantage" effect could be extended to social attention induced by gaze. Furthermore, the observed differential emotional modulations could not be simply explained by low-level physical differences between the emotional stimuli, as inverted social cues (i.e., BM and face) failed to produce such modulation effects. Overall, these findings highlight the role of emotional information in modulating the processing of social signals, and further suggest the existence of a general emotional modulation on social attention triggered by different types of social signals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... The earliest behavioral findings from Moore and colleagues reported a significant impairment in children and adolescents with ASD in the inference of internal emotional and mental states from biological motion point-light displays, but not in the categorization of overt biological actions (e.g., running, jumping, etc.) [11]. This finding, which has been replicated in studies of high-functioning children with ASD as well as adolescents and young adults with ASD, is consistent with an emotion-processing dysfunction rather than a more fundamental sensory-perceptual biological motion processing disorder [12,13]. Likewise, a lack of observed differences in biological motion identification and perception of specific biological motion features (i.e., kinematic profile, action discrimination in noise, direction discrimination in noise) provide further evidence for intact basic processing of biological motion in children, adolescents, and adults with ASD [14][15][16][17][18][19]. ...
Background
Biological motion imparts rich information related to the movement, actions, intentions and affective state of others, which can provide foundational support for various aspects of social cognition and behavior. Given that atypical social communication and cognition are hallmark symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), many have theorized that a potential source of this deficit may lie in dysfunctional neural mechanisms of biological motion processing. Synthesis of existing literature provides some support for biological motion processing deficits in autism spectrum disorder, although high study heterogeneity and inconsistent findings complicate interpretation. Here, we attempted to reconcile some of this residual controversy by investigating a possible modulating role for attention in biological motion processing in ASD.
Methods
We employed high-density electroencephalographic recordings while participants observed point-light displays of upright, inverted and scrambled biological motion under two task conditions to explore spatiotemporal dynamics of intentional and unintentional biological motion processing in children and adolescents with ASD ( n = 27), comparing them to a control cohort of neurotypical (NT) participants ( n = 35).
Results
Behaviorally, ASD participants were able to discriminate biological motion with similar accuracy to NT controls. However, electrophysiologic investigation revealed reduced automatic selective processing of upright biologic versus scrambled motion stimuli in ASD relative to NT individuals, which was ameliorated when task demands required explicit attention to biological motion. Additionally, we observed distinctive patterns of covariance between visual potentials evoked by biological motion and functional social ability, such that Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale-Socialization domain scores were differentially associated with biological motion processing in the N1 period in the ASD but not the NT group.
Limitations
The cross-sectional design of this study does not allow us to definitively answer the question of whether developmental differences in attention to biological motion cause disruption in social communication, and the sample was limited to children with average or above cognitive ability.
Conclusions
Together, these data suggest that individuals with ASD are able to discriminate, with explicit attention, biological from non-biological motion but demonstrate diminished automatic neural specificity for biological motion processing, which may have cascading implications for the development of higher-order social cognition.
