Evaluating the Time-Dependent Unfolding of Social Interactions in Autism

描述(由申请人提供)：患有自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)的儿童在社交方面表现出许多障碍，通常持续到青春期和成年期。这些缺陷严重阻碍了家庭和社区的精神和身体发育、学习和行为功能，也使成功的治疗变得困难。过去的研究发现，自闭症儿童缺乏社交能力是由一些组成领域的缺陷构成的，包括社会认知和社会感知过程。虽然与他人的良好互动依赖于认知能力，比如对他人的精神状态做出推断，但社交能力的另一个不太明显的组成部分存在于社会运动过程中，即社会互动过程中运动的人际协调。事实上，社会心理学研究已经发现，无论是以模仿的形式还是在鲜为人知的互动同步现象中，社会运动协调对于维持成功的人类社会互动的关键方面都很重要，包括人际反应、社会融洽和他人定向、积极的自我他人关系以及言语交流和理解。鉴于社交能力在自闭症中的重要性，这项拟议的研究将评估社交运动协调是否可以作为自闭症患者各种缺陷的社会能力的标志，并探索基于运动和基于认知的社会能力概念之间的关系。考虑到社会互动本身就是复杂的，并随着时间的推移而展开，我们建议不仅评估传统的社会能力认知测量，而且通过使用独特的、面向过程的社会协调测量和分析社交互动任务中社会协调随时间展开的时间序列记录，来评估整个ASD谱的社会协调的动态结构。我们通过使用多方法设计并检查捕捉社会互动的不同和复杂方面的测量之间的关系来调查关于自闭症的社会缺陷的广泛问题。此外，我们将通过包括具有不同语言和认知能力的儿童来应对ASD儿童群体中的异质性，以便更好地了解这些变量如何影响运动协调障碍，这些变量在ASD群体中差异很大。如果成功，这项研究对更多地了解ASD的社会缺陷的病因具有重要意义，并将为探索潜在的干预新途径提供肥沃的土壤。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit numerous impairments in social interaction that typically persist throughout adolescence and adulthood. These deficits severely impede mental and physical development, learning, and behavioral functioning at home and in the community and also make successful treatment difficult. Past research has found that the lack of social competence of children with ASD is comprised of deficits in a number of componential areas including social cognitive and social perceptual processes. Although interacting competently with others relies on cognitive abilities such as making inferences about another's mental state, a less obvious component of social competence lies within social motor processes, the interpersonal coordination of movements during a social interaction. Indeed social psychological research has found that social motor coordination both in the form of imitation and in the lesser known phenomenon of interactional synchrony, is important for maintaining critical aspects of successful human social interaction, including interpersonal responsiveness, social rapport and other-directedness, positive self-other relations, and verbal communication and comprehension. Given the importance of social competence in ASD, the proposed research will evaluate whether social motor coordination can be a marker for social competence in autism across the spectrum of deficits and explore the relationship between motorically-based and cognitively-based conceptions of social competence. Given that social interactions are inherently complex and unfold over time, we propose to evaluate not only traditional cognitive measures of social competence but also the dynamical structure of social coordination across the ASD spectrum by using unique, process-oriented measures of social coordination and analyzing the time series records of the time-dependent unfolding of social coordination during social interaction tasks. We investigate a broad range of questions concerning the social deficits in ASD by using a multi-method design and examining the relationships among measures that capture varied and complex aspects of social interactions. Additionally, we will confront the heterogeneity within the population of children with ASD by including children with a range of language and cognitive abilities in order to get a better sense of how deficits in motor coordination may be influenced by these variables that vary widely within the ASD population. If successful, the research proposed here has important implications for understanding more about the etiology of the social deficits in ASD and will provide a fertile ground for exploring potential new avenues for intervention.