Sensorimotor Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder: An evaluation of potential mechanisms

大约每100人中就有1人被诊断患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD），这是一种影响社会互动和沟通的疾病(1)。大量的研究表明，自闭症患者具有非典型的视觉驱动运动序列学习（回顾，见2）。ASD与笨拙、姿势不稳定和运动功能表现下降有关(3)，最终导致学习新运动技能的能力受损（运动学习；见4）。此外，视觉运动整合（用于指导运动学习）在ASD中被描述为“失调”(5)，自闭症患者表现出非典型的视觉运动学习(8)，过滤不相关信息(6)和区分分散注意力和任务相关视觉刺激(7)的能力下降。这些视觉运动缺陷可以理解为使用先验信息来指导行动和组合感觉输入的障碍。自闭症儿童在运动控制任务中表现出较低的预测性姿势反应(9)，并且较少受到谢泼德错觉（例10）的影响，这种效应被认为是由先验知识驱动的。然而，目前的研究受到了两个主要的批评：(i)它主要关注运动控制或视觉错觉的感知，而不是将视觉运动的多个元素整合在一起；（ii）研究倾向于关注运动控制的基本方面，而不是直接涉及健康和生活质量的功能结果。我们的方法旨在克服这些限制。这个项目将扩展现有的工作，并检查自闭症人群中受损的视觉运动过程。我们的目标是：(i)了解自闭症患者所经历的运动控制和感知功能问题的病因；随后（ii）为ASD人群开发一种新的干预措施，旨在增强视觉运动控制。这些目标与应用自闭症研究中心（CAAR）的目标一致，该中心旨在“通过世界级的研究了解自闭症”并“将理论转化为实际应用”。

Approximately 1 in every 100 people is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), a condition affecting social interaction and communication (1). A large body of work has shown that autistic individuals have atypical visually-driven motor sequence learning (for review, see 2).ASD is associated with clumsiness, postural instability, and reduced motor functioning performance (3), which ultimately culminates in impairments in the ability to learn novel motor skills (motor learning; see 4). Furthermore, visuomotor integration (used to guide motor learning) has been described as 'detuned' in ASD (5), with autistic individuals showing atypical visuomotor learning (8) with reduced abilities to filter out irrelevant information (6) and differentiate distracting and task-relevant visual stimuli (7).These visuomotor deficits can be understood as impairments in the use of prior information to guide actions and combine sensory input. Autistic children show a less predictive postural response in motor control tasks (9) and appear less affected by the Shepard illusion (e.g. 10), effects proposedly driven by prior knowledge. However, current research has received two major criticisms: (i) it largely focuses on motor control or visual perception of illusions separately, rather than incorporating multiple elements of visuomotor integration; (ii) research tends to focus on fundamental aspects of motor control, rather than functional outcomes that directly implicate health and quality of life. Our approach aims to overcome these limitations.This project will extend existing work and examine visuomotor processes that are impaired in autistic populations. We aim to: (i) develop an understanding of the aetiology of functional issues with motor control and perception that autistic people experience; and subsequently (ii) develop a novel intervention for the ASD population, aimed at enhancing visuomotor control. These objectives align with those of the Centre of Applied Autism Research (CAAR), which aims to 'understand autism through world-class research' and 'translate theory into practical applications'.