Pantomime Execution and Recognition in Autism

Children with autism spectrum disorders and typically developing children were assessed in pantomime execution and two tasks on pantomime observation consisting of meaning and error-recognition (Fabbri-Destro, Gizzonio, Bazzini, Cevallos, Cheron, and Avanzini, 2019).

In typically developping children their motor performance keeps their capability to recognize the meaning of pantomimes of the task, as well as the recognition of correctly performed pantomimes in the task of error recognition. Compared to typically developing children the children with autism spectrum disorder showed more worse performance in both pantomime execution as well as recognition. There were a lot of spatial errors made in the autism spectrum disorder group during pantomime execution.

Compared to typically developing children, the autism spectrum disorder children had an impairment in the capability for the recognition of spatial errors, and are resulting in diminished performance in autism spectrum disorder patients as a primary contributor. The agreement among deficits in execution and recognition of pantomimes is supportive that in autism there is a disorganized motor aspect that is related to how someone sees actions made by some other.

As a final conclusion, it is suggested that the findings of this study are an indication that in autism spectrum disorder patients impairments in action observation are especially closely related. And this is also associated with symptom severity arguing that the motor impairments are one of the most important aspects of autistic symptomatology (Fabbri-Destro et al., 2019).