Imitation and action understanding in autistic spectrum disorders: How valid is the hypothesis of a deficit in the mirror neuron system?
Imitation and action understanding in autistic spectrum disorders: How valid is the hypothesis of a deficit in the mirror neuron system?
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DOI：
10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.11.022
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发表时间：
2007-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Frith, Uta
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hamilton, Antonia F. de C.;Brindley, Rachel M.;Frith, Uta
运动镜像神经元系统支持典型成年人的模仿和目标理解。最近，有人提出，镜像神经元系统的缺陷可能会导致自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童的模仿能力较差，并且可能是这些儿童社交能力较差的原因。我们旨在通过检查 25 名自闭症谱系障碍儿童和 31 名相同语言心理年龄的典型儿童在四项动作表征任务和心理理论电池上的表现来检验这一假设。典型儿童和自闭症儿童都具有相同的模仿成人目标、以镜像方式模仿以及在运动计划任务中模仿抓握的倾向。患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童在手势识别任务中表现出出色的表现。这些模仿和手势识别任务都依赖于典型成年人的镜像神经元系统，但患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童的表现并没有受到损害。相比之下，自闭症谱系障碍组在心理理论任务上受到损害。这些结果提供了明确的证据，证明自闭症儿童存在普遍模仿障碍和整体镜像神经元系统缺陷。我们建议最好从多个大脑系统的角度来理解这些数据，以进行不同类型的模仿和动作理解，并且自闭症儿童理解和模仿手部动作目标的能力是完整的。 (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. 保留所有权利。
The motor mirror neuron system supports imitation and goal understanding in typical adults. Recently, it has been proposed that a deficit in this mirror neuron system might contribute to poor imitation performance in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and might be a cause of poor social abilities in these children. We aimed to test this hypothesis by examining the performance of 25 children with ASD and 31 typical children of the same verbal mental age on four action representation tasks and a theory of mind battery. Both typical and autistic children had the same tendency to imitate an adult's goals, to imitate in a mirror fashion and to imitate grasps in a motor planning task. Children with ASD showed superior performance on a gesture recognition task. These imitation and gesture recognition tasks all rely on the mirror neuron system in typical adults, but performance was not impaired in children with ASD. In contrast, the ASD group were impaired on the theory of mind tasks. These results provide clear evidence against a general imitation impairment and a global mirror neuron system deficit in children with autism. We suggest this data can best be understood in terms of multiple brain systems for different types of imitation and action understanding, and that the ability to understand and imitate the goals of hand actions is intact in children with ASD. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.