r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jan 30 '25

Neuroscience A low-cost tool accurately distinguishes neurotypical children from children with autism just by watching them copy the dance moves of an on-screen avatar for a minute. It can even tell autism from ADHD, conditions that commonly overlap.

https://newatlas.com/adhd-autism/autism-motion-detection-diagnosis/
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u/hashford Jan 30 '25

The article explains.

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u/Ok-Cook-7542 Jan 30 '25

no it doesnt though. i read it thrice and it never answers that question.

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u/AfricanUmlunlgu Jan 30 '25

It does not, unless I am so bad that I missed something.

I am trawling the comments to find the answer.

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u/Funky_Smurf Jan 30 '25

It doesn't say it explicitly, but requires some reading comprehension skills..

Compared to neurotypical children, studies have shown that children with ASD struggle particularly with tasks like ball catching and motor imitation that require efficient visual-motor integration.

Because it’s crucial for learning both social and motor skills, it follows that imitation could be a good biomarker for ASD. So, based on this and the aforementioned studies, the researchers developed the Computerized Assessment of Motor Imitation, or CAMI, to detect ASD by focusing on differences in motor imitation.

So

1) children with ASD struggle with motor imitation

2) researchers created a test to assess motor imitation

3) that test is this dance video

4) researchers are able to identify 80% of participants with ASD

So we can conclude that children with ASD perform lower on the dance test.