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/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/thanatossassin Jan 30 '25

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. Previous research has also found that children use imitation to form and maintain relationships with others and learn social norms and rituals. Those who can’t appropriately learn these social cues through imitation face exclusion from peers and the broader community.

Neuroptypical (non-ASD) children imitate the behaviors of others. It's a means of communicating that children with ASD struggle with or are incapable of.

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u/Ok-Cook-7542 Jan 30 '25

but the following sentence says the opposite of your tldr.

"Because it’s [imitation is] crucial for learning both social and motor skills, it follows that imitation could be a good biomarker for ASD"

meaning that people with ASD rely on imitation and that a child using imitation would be a "marker" for having ASD. the word the ASD community uses for this is masking: "Masking can mean mimicking the behavior of those around us, such as copying non-verbal behaviors and developing complex social scripts" (autism.org.uk)

i think honestly the article is poorly written and has a lot of unnecessary ambiguity and lack of clarity.

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u/thanatossassin Jan 30 '25

I think you're holding onto a positive bias with the term imitation in that sentence, but I can see how that could be confusing.

If we ask the question "What is a biomarker for determining ASD," a sufficient answer without coming to too much of a conclusion would be "Imitation," and all that is meant to say is that Imitation is a factor, but not exactly direct the correlation between imitation and ASD.

The reason for that is because they're introducing a new factor of imitation, which is sensory-motor difficulty. The study wants to get away from the more polar idea of whether a child imitates or not as the sole means for determining ASD.