Logo image
What do children with autism attend to during imitation tasks?
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

What do children with autism attend to during imitation tasks?

Giacomo Vivanti, Aparna Nadig, Sally Ozonoff and Sally J. Rogers
Journal of experimental child psychology, v 101(3), pp 186-205
01 Nov 2008
PMID: 18582895
url
https://europepmc.org/articles/pmc6952170View
Accepted (AM)Open Access (License Unspecified) Open

Abstract

Psychology Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Experimental Social Sciences
Individuals with autism show a complex profile of differences in imitative ability, including a general deficit in precision of imitating another's actions and special difficulty in imitating nonmeaningful gestures relative to meaningful actions on objects. Given that they also show atypical patterns of visual attention when observing social stimuli, we investigated whether possible differences in visual attention when observing an action to be imitated may contribute to imitative difficulties in autism in both nonmeaningful gestures and meaningful actions on objects. Results indicated that (a) a group of IS high-functioning 8- to 15-year-olds with autistic disorder, in comparison with a matched group of 13 typically developing children, showed Similar patterns Of Visual attention to the demonstrator's action but decreased attention to his face when observing a model to be imitated: (b) nonmeaningful gestures and meaningful actions on objects triggered distinct visual attention patterns that did not differ between groups; (c) the autism group demonstrated reduced imitative precision for both types of imitation; and (d) duration of visual attention to the demonstrator's action was related to imitation precision for nonmeaningful gestures in the autism group. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Metrics

12 Record Views
80 citations in Scopus

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#3 Good Health and Well-Being

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Psychology, Developmental
Psychology, Experimental
Logo image