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/zoinkability Jan 30 '25

My read of the article is that it is not diagnostic for ADHD, but that it is able to identify ASD in ADHD kids as well as non-ADHD kids.

Basically, many diagnostic tools struggle because of the overlaps in behavior between ASD and ADHD kids, but that on this particular test ADHD does not impair the ability to mirror someone dancing but ASD does.

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u/twoisnumberone Jan 30 '25

I think you're spot-on; it's not meant to differentiate normal kids versus ASD or ADHD, but to sort between the latter.

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u/zoinkability Jan 30 '25

I'd amend that to say that it differentiates non-ASD kids from ASD kids regardless of whether they have ADHD or not. By contrast, many tests don't differentiate well between ASD and ADHD, which complicates diagnosis and forces diagnosticians to identify patterns among multiple tests to differentially diagnose the two disorders.

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u/twoisnumberone Feb 04 '25

Yes, thank you! Helpful.