Are time-perception abnormalities linked to social and motor impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder?

In detail

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental disability that leads to problems with communication and social interaction. Recently, researchers have found that individuals with ASD often have a poor sense of time. The goal of this research project was to fully characterise the possible time perception deficit in children with ASD, and examine associations between the understanding of the elapse of time and social and motor skills in typically developing children and children with ASD. In order to do this a study was set up to test for differences between individuals with ASD and a matched control group on a variety of measures including tests of time perception, social perception and the ability to imitate (mimic) the actions of others.

Typically developing (TSD) and ASD diagnosed children were individually matched for age and non-verbal IQ. Nine participants from each group were submitted to analyses. Results demonstrated no significant difference in explicit temporal perception performance betweem typically developing and ASD children. However a statistically significant difference in results was achieved when testing the children's ability to discriminate between different temporal durations where the minimum observable temporal difference was much greater in ASD children than the typically developing children. The next stage was to examine the relationship between the temporal bisection task and basic motor skills.  Using the PANESS (the Physical and Neurological Assessment of Subtle Signs), we examined children's performance in coordination, balance, gait, aim, as well as their overflow movements (unwanted movements that occur during a desired movement) and coreiform (involuntary movements which may be rapid or jerky in nature). The higher the total score on the PANESS, the worse the basic motor skills, or the more overflow and more errors were observed during the different tasks.  Examining the temporal duration discrimination performance in relation to the PANESS scores (assessing individuals’ basic motor skills), a significant positive correlation was found between the children's temporal discrimination sensitivity and their basic motor skills. Whilst we do not speculate that intact time processing has a direct influence on motor skills (or vice versa), time perception and motor skills and social interaction abilities would appear to be highly inter-related.

The relationship and interdependencies between temporal processing, motor skills and social abilities warrant further exploration. As such, we are conducting a further studies to explore the timing aspects of action observation and prediction, and posit that the difficulties experienced by individuals with ASD in terms of reciprocal social communication and understanding and interpreting others’ actions may, in part, be due to deficiencies in accurately perceiving the elapse of time and being able to draw upon their own motor repertoire and motor cognition skills to accurately predict and interpret others’ actions.        

In working towards the aims of the project, the researchers have established collaborations with local primary and secondary schools, the city council and parent and child support groups for individuals affected by autism spectrum condition. This is a new network of organisational bodies that will continue to collaborate on future research projects conducted by the University of York to examine new theories relating to autistic spectrum disorders.

Victoria Brattan delivered a presentation on this research at the 10th Annual Child Mental Health Research Network Conference, at York District.

Outputs

Grants

• Patrick Johnston, ESRC, White Rose DTC PhD studentship 'Examining the interdependencies between motor cognition, temporal processing and social skills', £40,500

Publications

• Tipples, J., Brattan, V. C. & Johnston P. (2013). Neural Bases for Individual Differences in the Subjective Experience of Short Durations (Less than 2 Seconds). PLOS ONE, 8 (1), [e54669]