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Poster #45 - Taking it Slow: Reduced Tempo Training Improves Dance Movement Imitation in Children with Autism

Thu, March 21, 9:30 to 10:45am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Impairments in social-communicative skills are among the key defining features of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Decades of research shows that children with ASD have motor imitation difficulties (e.g., Dewey etal., 2007; MacNeil & Mostofsky, 2012). Impaired imitation can have important social-communicative consequences, as imitation is crucial for typical social interactions and social skill learning. Converging behavioral and neuroimaging research suggests that visuomotor integration may be particularly impaired in ASD, and that slowing down the visual stimuli may help improve imitation performance (Lainé etal., 2011; Nebel etal., 2016; Whyatt & Craig, 2012). The current study aims to investigate whether imitation of novel, whole-body movements will improve following a brief training involving slowing down the visual stimulus.

Hypothesis-1: At baseline, typically-developing (TD) children will imitate better than children with ASD.
Hypothesis-2: Overall, children will imitate better at test phase as compared to baseline.
Hypothesis-3: Improvement in imitation performance will be higher in children with ASD compared to the TD children.

Participants thus far include 31 8-12 year-old children (15 ASD, Mage=10.27, 7 girls). Children were shown three dance sequences (each comprised of novel, whole-body movements) and asked to imitate the avatar dancer in the video. Two of these dance sequences were presented in the training phase (at 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 100% speeds) and the remaining sequence was presented in the baseline and test phases (at 100% speed). Hence, we assessed how the training would improve imitation of novel, untrained movements. Children’s movements were recorded using two Kinect depth cameras, one in front of and one behind the child. The x-y-z coordinates of each joint were extracted using a motion capture software.

To assess imitation performance, dynamic time warping (dtw) analysis was conducted by comparing each child’s coordinate data to the coordinate data of the dancer: The resulting Euclidean distance output indicates the distance between the child’s joints and the dancer’s joints, with higher distance scores indicating poorer imitation performance. A sub-sample of 12 children’s videos were coded by two reliable, condition-blind coders to assess the validity of the dtw distance scores as a measure for imitation performance. The dtw distance scores and behavioral coding scores were significantly correlated with each other (r=.71, p=.01); therefore, we used dtw distance scores as our main dependent variable.

A one-way ANOVA on the baseline dtw distance scores showed that TD children imitated better than children with ASD at baseline (p=.026, Hypothesis-1). A 2(Diagnosis)X2(Condition: Baseline-Test) ANOVA revealed significant effects of diagnosis and condition. Across conditions, TD children imitated better than children with ASD (p=.036) and, across diagnosis, children imitated better at test than at baseline (Hypothesis-2, p=.002). Although the improvement rate was 26% higher in children with ASD as compared with TD children (Hypothesis-3), the diagnosisXcondition interaction was not significant. All test results are shown in Table-1 and Figure-1.
These findings extend previous research by showing that slowing down visual stimuli can improve imitation of untrained whole-body movements in ASD. The findings have important implications for developing naturalistic interventions targeted at improving social skills by altering visuomotor integration processes in children with autism.

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