Recognition of biological motion in children with autistic spectrum disorders

It is widely accepted that autistic children experience difficulties in processing and recognizing emotions. Most relevant studies have explored the perception of faces. However, context and bodily gestures are also sources from which we derive emotional meanings. We tested 23 autistic children and 23 typically developing control children on their ability to recognize point-light displays of a person's actions, subjective states and emotions. In a control task, children had to recognize point-light displays of everyday objects. The children with autism only differed from the control children in their ability to name the emotional point-light displays. This suggests that children with autism can extract complex meanings from bodily movements but may be less sensitive to higher-order emotional information conveyed by human movement. The results are discussed in the context of a specific deficit in emotion perception in children with autism.