Gross motor impairment and its relation to social skills in autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review and two meta-analyses.

Gross motor ability is associated with profound differences in how children experience and interact with their social world. A rapidly growing literature on motor development in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) indicates that autistic individuals exhibit impairment in gross motor skills. However, due to substantial heterogeneity across studies, it remains unclear which gross motor skills are impaired in ASD, when and for whom these differences emerge, and whether motor and social impairments are related. The present article addressed these questions by synthesizing research on gross motor skills in ASD in two separate meta-analyses. The first examined gross motor deficits in ASD compared to neurotypical (NT) controls, aggregating data from 114 studies representing 6,423 autistic and 2,941 NT individuals. Results demonstrated a significant overall deficit in gross motor skills in ASD (Hedges' g = -1.04) that was robust to methodological and phenotypic variation and was significant at every level of the tested moderators. However, moderation analyses revealed that this deficit was most pronounced for object control skills (i.e., ball skills), clinical assessment measures, and movements of the upper extremities or the whole body. The second meta-analysis investigated whether gross motor and social skills are related in ASD, synthesizing data from 21 studies representing 654 autistic individuals. Findings revealed a modest but significant overall correlation between gross motor and social skills in ASD (r = 0.27). Collectively, results support the conclusion that motor deficits are tied to the core symptoms of ASD. Further research is needed to test the causality and directionality of this relationship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Motor Skill Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder: a Clinically Focused Review.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: This review synthesizes recent, clinically relevant findings on the scope, significance, and centrality of motor skill differences in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). RECENT FINDINGS: Motor challenges in ASD are pervasive, clinically meaningful, and highly underrecognized, with up to 87% of the autistic population affected but only a small percentage receiving motor-focused clinical care. Across development, motor differences are associated with both core autism symptoms and broader functioning, though the precise nature of those associations and the specificity of motor profiles to ASD remain unestablished. Findings suggest that motor difficulties in ASD are quantifiable and treatable, and that detection and intervention efforts targeting motor function may also positively influence social communication. Recent evidence supports a need for explicit recognition of motor impairment within the diagnostic framework of ASD as a clinical specifier. Motor differences in ASD warrant greater clinical attention and routine incorporation into screening, evaluation, and treatment planning.

Bayesian regression-based developmental norms for the Benton Facial Recognition Test in males and females.

Face identity recognition is important for social interaction and is impaired in a range of clinical disorders, including several neurodevelopmental disorders. The Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT; Benton & Van Allen, 1968), a widely used assessment of identity recognition, is the only standardized test of face identity perception, as opposed to face memory, that has been normed on children and adolescents. However, the existing norms for the BFRT are suboptimal, with several ages not represented and no established time limit (which can lead to inflated scores by allowing individuals with prosopagnosia to use feature matching). Here we address these issues with a large normative dataset of children and adolescents (ages 5-17, N = 398) and adults (ages 18-55; N = 120) who completed a time-limited version of the BFRT. Using Bayesian regression, we demonstrate that face identity perception increases asymptotically from childhood through adulthood, and provide continuous norms based on age and sex that can be used to calculate standard scores. We show that our time limit of 16 seconds per item yields scores comparable to the existing norms without time limits from the non-prosopagnostic samples. We also find that females (N = 156) score significantly higher than males (N = 362), supporting the existence of a female superiority effect for face identification. Overall, these results provide more robust norms for the BFRT and promote future research on face identity perception in developmental populations.

What's in a name? A preliminary event-related potential study of response to name in preschool children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

The ability to selectively respond to one's own name is important for social and language development, and is disrupted in atypically developing populations (e.g., autism spectrum disorder). Research with typically developing samples using event-related potentials (ERPs) has demonstrated that the subject's own name (SON) is differentiated from other stimuli at both early sensory and later cognitive stages of auditory processing. While neural indices of response to name have been researched extensively in adults, no such studies have been conducted with typically developing preschool children or children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study investigated ERP response to name in a sample of typically developing (TD) preschoolers (n = 19; mean age = 4.3 years) as well as a small, exploratory comparison group of preschoolers with ASD (n = 13; mean age = 4.4 years). TD preschoolers exhibited significantly greater negativity to SON over frontal regions than to an unfamiliar nonsense name, consistent with the adult SON negativity component. This component was present whether the name was spoken by a parent or an unfamiliar adult, suggesting that it reflects SON-specific processing rather than broad self-relevant information processing. Comparing preschoolers with ASD to the TD children revealed a significant SON negativity component across both groups. The amplitude of the SON negativity response was significantly correlated with social variables in the ASD group, though these correlations did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. This study is the first to demonstrate the presence of the SON component in preschool children with and without ASD.