autism social

7/28/2019 Autism Social

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O RI G I N A L P A P E R

Unimpaired Perception of Social and Physical Causality,but Impaired Perception of Animacy in High Functioning

Children with Autism

Sara Congiu Anne Schlottmann Elizabeth Ray

Published online: 28 July 2009

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009

Abstract We investigated perception of social and

physical causality and animacy in simple motion events,for high-functioning children with autism (CA = 13,

VMA = 9.6). Children matched 14 different animations to

pictures showing physical, social or non-causality. In

contrast to previous work, children with autism performed

at a high level similar to VMA-matched controls, recog-

nizing physical causality in launch and social causality in

reaction events. The launch deficit previously found in

younger children with autism, possibly related to atten-

tional/verbal difficulties, is apparently overcome with age.

Some events involved squares moving non-rigidly, like

animals. Children with autism had difficulties recognizing

this, extending the biological motion literature. However,

animacy prompts amplified their attributions of social

causality. Thus children with autism may overcome their

animacy perception deficit strategically.

Keywords High-functioning autism

Perceptual causality Perceptual animacy

Introduction

Perceptual causality and animacy refer to perceptual illu-

sions in 2-dimensional displays devoid of real causality or

animate agents, illusions that can be related to the social

deficits and perceptual peculiarities of autism. Here, we

assess these illusions in high functioning children with

autism, to help illuminate basic processes of (social) per-

ception involved in the disorder.

Perceptual causality occurs in schematic events like

launching and reaction (Fig. 1) involving two geometrical

shapes (e.g., Schlottmann et al. 2006; Michotte 1946/1963;

Kanizsa and Vicario 1968). The events can be seen to

represent proto-typical physical and social interactions, i.e.,

elastic collisions with transfer of momentum and chase/

escape sequences with contingent motion-at-a-distance.

Although the animations are ambiguous (e.g., the shapes

can be perceived as 2-dimensional or a projection of

3-dimensional objects from the side or top/bottom) and

involve a reduced number of features (e.g., absence of

sound), they nevertheless give rise to convincing impres-

sions of causality, with adults usually describing the launch

event as A pushes B or A hits B and sets it in motion

and the reaction event as A chases B or B escapes from

Awith B reacting intentionally to A. These impressions

are, however, linked to the spatial and temporal event

configuration, with the introduction of even a brief pause

between A and Bs motion disrupting the causal illusion.

Perceptual causality (PC) emerges early in development

and might support causal learning and social motivation:

Children from age 3 (Schlottmann et al. 2002) and infants

as young as 6 months show sensitivity to the causal roles of

the agents in habituation paradigms (Leslie and Keeble

1987; Schlottmann and Surian 1999; Schlottmann et al.

2009; Oakes and Cohen 1994; Cohen and Amsel 1998).

S. Congiu

Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze Sociali, University of Siena,Siena, Italy

A. Schlottmann (&) E. Ray

Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University

College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK

e-mail: [email protected]

S. Congiu (&)

Dipartimento di Scienze della Cognizione e della Formazione,

University of Trento, Corso Bettini 31, 38068 Rovereto, TN,

Italy

e-mail: [email protected]

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J Autism Dev Disord (2010) 40:3953

DOI 10.1007/s10803-009-0824-2
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Thus, PC could help infants identify causal events without

need for previous knowledge or experience, with percep-

tion of contact causality promoting learning about

mechanical interactions of material bodies (Leslie 1988,1995; Schlottmann 1999) while perception of non-contact

causality could promote learning about the social interac-

tions of intentional agents (Schlottmann and Surian 1999).

Impaired PC early in development, in contrast, could be

related to later problems in these areas. Accordingly, we

study PC in autism, using a sensitive method that may help

overcome some shortcomings of previous work (Bowler

and Thommen 2000; Ray and Schlottmann 2007).

Social Deficits in Autism and Perception of Causality at

a Distance

The social deficits characterising autism suggest that per-

ception of reaction causality could be impaired in this

population. Research on very early behavioural symptoms

of autism (Osterling et al. 2002; Chawarska and Volkmar

2005) has highlighted social impairments that precede even

the earliest precursors of theory of mind (ToM) skills,

suggesting that the lack of ToM (Baron Cohen et al. 1985)

could be consequence rather than cause of basic social and

perceptual disabilities (Klin et al. 1992).

Poor sensitivity to naturally occurring social stimuli,

lack of response to their own name (Osterling and Dawson

1994; Osterling et al. 2002), abnormal eye contact (Volk-

mar and Mayes 1990), lack of response to, as well as ini-

tiation of joint attention (Loveland and Landry 1986;

Mundy et al. 1990; Mundy and Neal 2001), and lack of

communicative intent (Tager-Flusberg et al. 2005) are

symptoms of autism in toddlers younger than two (Carter

et al. 2005). Two-year-olds with autism also show impaired

or abnormal perception of biological human motion in

point light displays (Klin et al. 2003; Klin and Jones 2008).

Overall, research supports the idea that the developmental

trajectory of children with autism differs from early on,

probably from birth, and that poor attention to social

stimuli goes hand in hand with anomalies in social

development.The limited salience of social stimuli and related lack of

interest in the social environment then limits further pos-

sibilities for learning to manage social interactions. This

may impact later outcome in addition to any biological

factors involved (Rogers et al. 2005). Along these lines,

problems with the perception of reaction causality might

contribute to the reduced amount of social information

available to children with autism early on, with negative

consequences for later understanding of the behaviour of

intentional agents.

People with autism not only have a qualitative deficit in

everyday social interactions, but also in the verbal

description of social elements in complex animated dis-

plays similar to those pioneered by Heider and Simmel

(1944) in which geometrical shapes interact in various

ways (Klin 2000; Bowler and Thommen 2000; Abell et al.

2000; Castelli et al. 2002). This is not related to age or

verbal IQ (Klin 2000) and no difficulty appears in the

description of contact interactions (Bowler and Thommen

2000). Thus children with autism may have difficulties in

the perception of social events. It is still unclear, however,

whether the difficulty is perceptual, in which case it should

appear even in much simpler animations, like reaction

events, or whether it reflects more general difficulties with

understanding social situations, needed to interpret com-

plex animations.

Two prior studies tested the perceptual view directly,

looking at PC in simple causal animations (Bowler and

Thommen 2000; Ray and Schlottmann 2007). Neither found

a deficit in reaction perception for children with autism

relative to normal children. However, both studies may have

lacked sensitivity: Bowler and Thommen (2000) studied

verbal reports, and even typically developing children

Fig. 1 a Launch event: The launch event (Michotte 1946/1963)

involves two squares, A on the left and B in the middle of the screen.

A starts moving towards B (from left to right) suddenly stopping upon

contact while at the same time B starts moving following the same

direction and then stopping. The version of the launch event (and

subsequent events) used here lasted 8 s, with the duration of each

motion phase indicated in the figure.b Reaction event: In the reaction

event (Kanizsa and Vicario 1968) A moves towards B (like in the

launch), but B starts moving before A reaches it, so that A and B

move simultaneously in the same direction, then A stops while B

continues to move for a while

40 J Autism Dev Disord (2010) 40:3953

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between 5 and 12 years often describe causal events in

spatio-temporal rather than causal terms (Thommen et al.

1998). Ray and Schlottmanns (2007) less verbal picture

matching method is sensitive to PC in normal children from

3 to 4 years (Schlottmann et al. 2002), but to test low-

functioning children with autism they used 1- and 2-word

utterance instructions, which led to a overall decrease in

performance even in the normal controls. The reducedinstruction may therefore have interfered with task under-

standing. The method of the present study is closer to that of

Schlottmann et al. (2002), for a test that is more sensitive

than previous work to any potential reaction deficit in

autism.

Perceptual Deficits in Autism and Perception of Contact

Causality

The non-social, perceptual and attentional deficits charac-

terising autism suggest that perception of launch causality,

or both reaction and launch causality might be impaired.The good performance of people with autism on perceptual

tasks requiring attention to local elements, like Wechsler

block-design (Shah and Frith 1983) or the embedded fig-

ures test (Shah and Frith 1993; Joliffe and Baron-Cohen

1997), and difficulties in tasks like face recognition on the

basis of holistic processing (Langdell 1978), were origi-

nally interpreted as two sides of the same coin. The most

influential theory of non-social symptoms of autism, the

Weak Central Coherence theory (WCC; Frith 1989; Happe

2005) was initially formulated to explain deficits and assets

in autism as originating from a difficulty to integrate details

into meaningful wholes.

Subsequent experimental findings confirmed enhanced

processing abilities at the local level, but also showed that

global processing occurs under some conditions (Mottron

et al. 2006; Mottron and Burack 2001; Ozonoff et al. 1994;

Plaisted et al. 1999; Plaisted 2001), as recognized in the

most recent version of WCC theory (Happe and Frith

2006). Mottron and Buracks (2001) enhanced perceptual

functioning model (EPF) similarly argues for superiority

per se of low-level perceptual operations unrelated to

processing of the global aspects of information, so that in

autism, in contrast to what happens in typical individuals,

higher-order control over cognition may not be mandatory

(Mottron et al. 2006). Regardless of which model is

adopted, a local processing bias in autism might predict a

general PC deficit: Perception of causality requires global

processing and attention to the overall causal gestalt rather

than the component motions. Bowler and Thommen

(2000), found no deficit, but this may reflect their insen-

sitive verbal task. Ray and Schlottmann (2007), on the

other hand, found a PC deficit, but only for launch

perception.

The inconsistency can be resolved by considering how

launch and reaction events differ. In particular, the crucial

moment of contact between the shapes in the launch event

is very brief, while the simultaneous motion of the shapes

in the reaction event extends over an extended time frame

of several hundred milliseconds. This difference in the

temporal characteristics of the events might mean that

launch events are more difficult to process for children withautism.

Two accounts might be given of this difficulty. First,

central control processes might operate slowly in autism

(Joliffe and Baron-Cohen 1997). For instance, a selective

attention Navon task with extremely short stimuli produced

a local advantage in autism (Mottron and Belleville 1993),

when a global advantage appears with longer stimuli

(Plaisted et al. 1999). Thus very brief stimuli might be

insufficient to support global processing in autism.

Alternatively, it might be difficult in launch events to

shift attention rapidly from shape A to the interaction, so as

to not miss the defining moment of contact. Individualswith autism are often slower at disengaging attention

(Wainwright-Sharp and Bryson 1993; Allen and Cour-

chesne 2001) and shifting attention between and within

modalities (Courchesne et al. 1994; Townsend et al. 1996;

Allen and Courchesne 2001). These attentional difficulties

would also predict that children with autism might have

more difficulties with launch than reaction events.

For a test of these views, Ray and Schlottmann (2007)

suggested an entraining event, in which shape A contacts

B, and pushes it forward for a while. This is an example of

physical causality involving a longer causal interaction

(Michotte 1946/1963), which should eliminate a slow

processing difficulty in autism. In contrast, a cueing stim-

ulus at the point of, but prior to contact, should help chil-

dren shift attention. The present study takes up both

suggestions.

The Present Study

In sum, the present study considered PC in autism using

Ray and Schlottmanns (2007) picture choice method (see

Fig. 2) to minimize memory and verbal demands and to

avoid problems with verbal descriptions as in Thommen

et al. (1998). However, the present instructions are similar

to those used by Schlottmann et al. (2002) with typically

developing children, rather than the rudimentary 1- and

2-word instructions developed by Ray and Schlottmann

(2007), which may have reduced task understanding.

Of course, our more articulated instructions required

children with autism to function at a higher verbal level

(9.6 VMA versus 5.1 in Ray and Schlottmann 2007), and

this also meant that our sample has a higher chronological

age (13.0 versus 8.4). This should not affect a launch deficit

J Autism Dev Disord (2010) 40:3953 41

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due to slow global processing, which persists into adult-

hood (Mottron and Belleville 1993). However, it might

improve launch performance if the deficit reflects atten-

tional problems, as these may decrease with age (Allen and

Courchesne 2001).

The test included the 8 launch, reaction and delayed

control events used by Ray and Schlottmann (2007), plus 6

new events. An entraining event (Fig. 3a), with prolonged

contact of the shapes, was added to test the slow-processing

hypothesis. In a cued launch event to test the attentional

shift hypothesis, shape B flashed on and off while A moved

towards it (Fig. 3b). This might help individuals with

autism cope with a possibly slower disengage/move com-

ponent of attention (Wainwright-Sharp and Bryson 1993;

Wainwright and Bryson 1996).

Finally, we showed children an ambiguous event

(Fig. 3c), with simultaneous motion at a distance, as in a

reaction event, followed by contact, as in launching, to testfor any preference for a physical or social interpretation.

Young children with typical development take this event to

show physical causality (Watts et al. 2007). If children with

autism have a launch perception deficit they should not

show this pattern.

Events were shown with rigid motion and with a

rhythmic, non-rigid motion (Fig. 4). This did not sys-

tematically affect causal attributions in Ray and Schlott-

mann (2007), but this non-effect might have been a

casualty of the generally depressed performance in that

study. Michottes (1963) caterpillar stimulus appears

animate to adults and children (Schlottmann et al. 2002;

Schlottmann et al. 2006; Schlottmann and Ray 2004) and

children with autism have well-documented difficulties

with processing biological motion (e.g., Blake et al.

2003). Accordingly, it seemed important to re-consider

the perception of this artificial form of biological motion

in a more sensitive paradigm. The relation between per-

ception of animacy and causality is reconsidered in thediscussion.

Fig. 2 Choice pictures: A boy pushes a cart, corresponding to

physical causality; a boy stands still while a girl walks away,

corresponding to independent movement; a boy runs after a girl who

runs away, corresponding to social causality. None of the pictures

represents contact in order to avoid simple contact matching

responses

Fig. 3 a Entraining event: In entraining, shape A moves towards B

and makes contact with it, as in launching, but upon contact the two

shapes continue moving together (as if A pushes B) until A stops. The

interaction between A and B lasts exactly as long as in the reaction

event (about 680 ms). b Cued launch event: A approaches B, and

after 1428 ms B flashes on and off for 425 ms, ceasing 187 ms prior

to impact. The total duration of the approach phase thus is 1983 ms,

exactly as in the non-cued launch event. c Ambiguous event: This

shows in effect a reaction followed by a launch. First A moves

towards B, with B beginning to move prior to contact, as in the

reaction event. However, A moves twice as fast as B and catches up

with it. Upon contact with B, A stops, while B continues to move as in

the launch event


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Method

Participants

Forty-one children participated in the study, 19 children

with high-functioning autism and 22 children with typical

development matched for verbal mental age. Children with

autism were tested during their regular appointment at the

Child Neuropsychiatry Unit of the Hospital in Siena (17)

and in LAquila (2), children with typical development

attended a primary school in Quartu S.E. (CA). Children

with autism were diagnosed according to DSM-IV

(APAssociation 1994) criteria by expert professionals as

measured by the ADOS, module 3, rating of 79 (Lord

et al. 1999). The ADOS and a cognitive evaluation with the

WISC-R (Wechsler 1986; the version still used in Italy)

were administered in separate sessions by hospital staff, or

the IQ scores were already in the clinical records of the

children. Chronological ages and psychometric data are in

Table 1.

Design

The events included all 8 stimuli from Ray and Schlottmann

(2007), i.e., launch and reaction events, and their delayed

non-causal equivalents with and without contact, all with

both rigid and non-rigid agents, in a 2 (presence/absence of

contact) 9 2 (presence/absence of delay) 9 2 (rigid/non-

rigid motion) factorial design. The 6 new events consisted

of ambiguous reaction ? launch events and of entraining

events with both rigid and non-rigid agents, as well as cued

launch and reaction events (Fig. 3). The latter were shown

only with rigid motion, since the flash cue seemed to

interfere with perception of the non-rigid motion.

The 14 animations were presented in two sets of 8 and 6

each, separated by a brief pause. The stimuli in the first set

involved rigidly moving shapes, while the second set had

non-rigid motion. Events within each set were presented in

a different random order for each child, except that the two

cued events were always presented at the end of the set, (to

avoid that the cue interfered with the task). As a measure of

perceptual causality, for each event children chose which

of three pictures in Fig. 2 corresponded best to each movie.

As a measure of perceptual animacy we asked children to

describe the non-rigid motion stimuli on initial encounter.

Subsequently, we gave hints to consider an animate inter-

pretation of the stimuli, to amplify any potential animacy

effects on childrens subsequent causal attributions.

Materials

The stimuli were 2D animations realised with Macromedia

Director Software (MX. 2004, Macromedia inc. S.Fran-

cisco California), integrated in a graphic interface and

shown on a portable PC (Toshiba Satellite M-30 853) on a

TFT 20 9 35 cm screen with a resolution of 1280 9 800

pixels. Each movie lasted 480 frames (2 pixel/frame at 60

f/s, about 8 s) and repeated continuously for the duration of

a trial with a pause (1 s) at the end of each cycle during

which the normally white screen turned gray.

Each animation involved 2 squares, (60 9 60 pixels,

1.5 9 1.5 cm), initially stationary, blue on the left and red

Fig. 4 Caterpillar stimulus (Michotte 1946/1963): A square expands towards the right, with the left edge stationary, then contracts, with the

right edge stationary. The resultant translation appears animate

Table 1 Participant characteristics

Group Chronological age Verbal mental age Verbal IQ Performance IQ Full scale IQ

Autism (n = 19)

Mean 13.0 9.6 74.26 79.63 75.21

Range 8.218.7 5.815.9 45111 45120 40110

SD 2.9 3.0 21.79 23.97 23.42

Typical Dev. (n = 22)

Mean 9.5 124.77

Range 8.109.10 97143

SD 0.3 12.474

Note: Ages presented in years months format


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in the middle of the screen. The shapes always moved from

left to right. In all events, shapes A and B moved 120

frames each, covering a distance of 6 cm each.

The animations were presented in two versions. In the

first set, the squares moved rigidly at a constant speed of

about 2 pixels/frame (about 3 cm/s), except for the

ambiguous event. In the second set, they moved non-rig-

idly, expanding and contracting with the same averagetranslation speed. With the left edge stationary, the non-

rigid square expanded horizontally for 20 frames at a rate

of 4 pixels/frame (about 6 cm/s) to a rectangle of 60 9 140

pixels (1.5 9 3.5 cm). Then it contracted at the same speed

with the right edge stationary until the original shape was

recovered. These steps repeated three times during each

shapes motion.

The two sets involved corresponding events with iden-

tical temporal and spatial configuration (except for the cued

stimuli which only involved rigid motion). In some movies

B moved only after contact with A: In launching with and

without attentional cue, A stopped upon contact with B. Bbegan to move after 1 frame (about 17 ms). In cued

launching, B began to flash off and on after A had moved

84 frames (about 1.4 s). It flashed for 25 frames (425 ms),

stopping 11 frames (about 187 ms) prior to contact. In

entraining, A moved up to B, then continued forward,

pushing B for 40 frames (about 680 ms) before stopping. In

delayed launching A moved up to B, and B started moving

after 120 frames contact (about 2 s).

In some events B moved without contact: In the reaction

event with and without cue, A moved for 80 frames, then B

began to move as well, with 100 pixels (about 2.5 cm)

separation between shapes. Both shapes moved simulta-

neously for 40 frames (about 680 ms) before A stopped,

and B continued to move for another 80 frames (about

1.360 s). In the delayed reaction A moved close to B (20

pixels, about .5 cm separation), and B started moving after

120 frames (about 2 s) contact. In the cued reaction,

flashing began with the movement of B and lasted 25

frames (425 ms) as in the launch event. Finally, in the

ambiguous event, A moved at the standard speed, while B

moved at half speed of 1 pixel/frame (1.5 cm/s). A moved

for 80 frames, then B began to move as well, with 40

frames simultaneous motion at a distance, as in the stan-

dard reaction event. At the end of this period, A had caught

up with B, stopping upon contact, as in the standard launch

event. B then moved alone for another 80 frames. To

equate cycle length between events with different temporal

configurations, stationary periods at the beginning and end

of each cycle were adjusted.

Children chose from three (14 9 21 cm) pictures of a

boy pushing a cart (physical causality), chasing a girl

(social causality) or standing with a girl walking by

(independent, non-causal motion). Two additional movies

and pictures were used only for practice. In the apart

movie A and B appeared side by side in the middle of the

screen, then moved rigidly towards opposite directions. In

the climb movie the two squares were in their usual posi-

tion, then A climbed over B. The corresponding pictures

showed a boy and a girl back-to-back, walking away from

one another, and a boy climbing over a fence.

Procedure

The procedure used was similar to that used by Ray and

Schlottmann (2007) with two main differences: In the

present study more verbal instructions were provided, and

children were prompted about animacy for the second set

of non-rigid stimuli.

Children were tested individually in a quiet room, in a

session of 2030 min. During training, children were fa-

miliarised with the pictures and the picture-matching pro-

cedure. Children were initially asked to describe the

pictures, the Experimenter (E.) listened to the child, gaveprompts and verbally reinforced correct answers, or pro-

vided an adequate description in order to avoid misinter-

pretations. For the training pictures, E. said the boy is

climbing over, he goes up and then down and the chil-

dren are walking in two opposite directions, one is going

this way and the other is going that way, while pointing to

appropriate parts of each picture. For the experimental

pictures E said the boy is pushing the cart, or the boy is

standing while the girl is walking away, or the boy is

chasing after the girl, she escapes. The familiarisation

with the pictures was usually rehearsed twice, with E

asking the child to describe each picture, providing the

correct interpretation as needed and asking again to check

that the child understood and recalled.

Then the apart and climb movies were used to explain

that the task required to match pictures and movies. After a

few repetitions of the climbing movie E. asked the child:

Did you see the two squares moving? Does it look like

one of these pictures? Which one? The same was done

with the apart movie. After the training, both training

drawings were removed.

At the beginning of the test, E. told the child that he/she

would see the shapes moving and should choose an image

for each movie just like before. After the child saw each

animation, E. asked two general questions what happens in

the movie? and what do the squares do? and the child

chose a picture. If the child hesitated, E. asked if the movie

was similar to one of the pictures. Each stimulus repeated

until the child gave an answer, typically 24 times.

The second set involving the non-rigid movies was

presented after a 25 min break. Before starting the first

movie to the child, E. said This will be different from what

you have seen before. After the child had watched the


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animation E. asked What do the red and the blue look

like? and What could they be? If the child identified the

shapes as caterpillars, worms, snakes, slugs or

similar, E. said good, its true, you are right, or, if the

child didnt answer or answered rectangles or similar, E.

said yes, but they could also seem worms, or snakes, dont

you think? Then all children who needed explicit

prompting were told to watch again, and the procedure wasrepeated. Following this, children were asked about the

causality of the movie, in the manner outlined above, then

the next movie was shown.

Childrens picture choices were recorded by E. and, for

all but 4 children, also by a second observer blind to the

stimulus shown. Observers agreed in 99% of the cases. In

case of disagreement, the blind observers response was

taken for the analysis. In 4 instances, children spontane-

ously picked 2 pictures, so two answers were recorded.

Results

Causal Perception

Childrens causal choices are in Fig. 5. The data for rigid

events (top panels) show that both children with autism and

controls identified the various events appropriately, mostly

choosing the physical collision picture (light gray bar on

left) for launch events with and without cue and for

entraining events. They mostly chose the social, chase

picture (dark bar in the middle) for reaction events with and

without cue. Delayed events were mostly seen as non-

causal (mid gray bar on right).

No weakness on either launch or reaction events wasapparent for children with autism. The only notable dif-

ference in perception of the rigid motions between children

with autism and controls appears for the ambiguous event,

showing a reaction followed by a collision: children with

autism saw this largely as physical, while controls showed

a split pattern.

Both children with autism and controls gave somewhat

more social attributions to non-rigid events, as apparent in

the extended dark bars in the bottom panels of Fig. 5. For

some events, this tendency appears slightly more pro-

nounced in the autism group. Children with autism and

normal controls still tended to attribute physical causalityto launch, social causality to reaction stimuli and non-

causality to delayed events with non-rigid as with rigid

agents, but responses to entraining and ambiguous events

with non-rigid agents are now split for both groups of

children.

Fig. 5 Proportion of picture choices (%) for each of 14 events listed

to the left of the data; autism left panel, control right, rigid-motion

top, non-rigid motion bottom, light gray physical causality, dark gray

social causality, mid gray non causal. On the left are listed the mean

causal scores for each event, as used in the ANOVA. A score close to

1 indicates prevalence of physical causality choices, a score close to 0

indicates prevalence of non causal choices or mixed responses, a

negative score indicates prevalence of social causality choices


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For the statistical analysis, following Schlottmann et al.

(2002), physical responses were coded as 1, social as -1,

and non-causal as 0. (If children chose 2 pictures, the

average score was used). These causal scores are also listed

in Fig. 5, on the right in each panel, showing positive

scores for launch events, i.e., physical attributions, negative

scores for reaction events, i.e., social attributions, and

generally low scores around 0 for delayed control eventswith and without contact. This reflects the causal-non-

causal distinction and the domain distinction within the

causal events that were already evident in the raw choice

data.

Because children were matched on mental age, but

differed in VIQ, we initially assessed whether this variable

related to performance on the 14 events. However, only

one of 14 across-group correlations was significant, such

that higher VIQ was linked to a stronger tendency to

attribute social causality to ambiguous events involving

rigid motion, r = -.354, p = .023. This was due to the

control children, r = -.450, p = .036, with r = .054 forchildren with autism. For the control children, but not

children with autism, higher VIQ was also associated with

a tendency to attribute social causality to non-rigid reaction

events, r = -.471, p = .027, The correlation between VIQ

and a composite score across all 14 events reached

r = .034 overall, with r = .071 and .005 for children with

autism and controls, respectively. Thus, VIQ was not

associated with childrens causal scores, either within or

across groups.1 As would be expected therefore, ANCOVA

on the childrens mean causal scores for either the 8 events

of the main design, as considered just below, or for all 14

events, with groups as between subjects factor and VIQ as

a covariate (Winer et al. 1991) found no effects, all F\ 1,

so VIQ was not considered further.

For our main analysis, a 2 group (autism, control) 9 2

spatial configuration (contact, non-contact), 9 2 temporal

configuration (delay, no delay) 9 2 type of motion (rigid,

non-rigid) mixed model factorial ANOVA was conducted

on the 8 stimuli previously used by Ray and Schlottmann

(2007).2 The spatial configuration main effect tests for

whether children distinguish between physical and social

causality. If children also distinguish between causal and

non-causal events, we additionally expect a spatial 9 tem-

poral configuration interaction, to reflect that the domain

distinction should appear for events without delay, while

delayed events should all be treated as non-causal. The

temporal main effect itself should be 0, with positive and

negative means for contact and non-contact events can-

celling each other, and the delay mean should be 0 as well.

The domain and causal-noncausal distinctions were

reflected in a main effect for the spatial configuration,

F(1,39) = 95.89, MSe = 0.49, p\ 0.001, and a spatial 9

temporal configuration interaction, F(1,39) = 69.88,

MSe = 0.44, p\0.001, as predicted. In addition, there wasan effect for type of motion, F(1,39) = 7.04, MSe = 0.48,

p = 0.01, with less positive/more negative scores, i.e., more

social attributions, to non-rigid motion. Finally, there was a

marginal main effect for the temporal configuration,

F(1,39) = 3.75, MSe = 0.25, p = 0.06, and for the tem-

poral configuration 9 group interaction F(1,39) = 2.9,

MSe = 0.25, p = 0.09. These effects were largely due to

children with typical development having slightly negative

rather than 0 scores for causal, slightly positive rather than 0

scores for delayed events. There were no other effects, in

particular, there were no significant group differences

between children with autism and the control group, allremaining F\ 1.

Analyses of the two cued events showed that they were

not treated differently from the equivalent events without

cue. There were also no group differences, with the largest

effect involving either factor reaching F(1,39) = 0.63. The

only significant effect in the 2 group 9 2 cue 9 2 spatial

configuration ANOVA was the spatial configuration main

effect, F(1,39) = 118.74, MSe = 0.65, p\ 0.001, con-

firming again the clear distinction between launch and

reaction events.

Analysis of the entraining event showed that this was

treated as more physical than the reaction event (which had

an identical amount of simultaneous motion, but no con-

tact). This was reflected in the main effect of event,

F(1,39) = 19.02, MSe = 0.545, p\ 0.001, in the 2

group 9 2 event 9 2 type of motion ANOVA. In addition,

there was an effect for type of motion, F(1,39) = 99.29,

MSe = 0.48, p =\ 0.001, with non-rigid entraining

events appearing less physical. All other effects, including

those involving group, were non-significant, with the

largest reaching F(1,39) = 2.38.

When entraining was compared to launching (which

also had contact, but no simultaneous motion), the 2

group 9 2 type of motion 9 2 event ANOVA, found main

effects for event, F(1,39) = 7.97, MSe = 0.43, p = 0.007,

and for type of motion F(1,39) = 12.46, MSe = 0.63,

p = 0.001. Although the interaction is marginal,

F(1,39) = 3.61, p = 0.06, it is evident from the scores that

both groups of children treated launching and entraining as

equally physical when the shapes moved rigidly, but

entraining appeared distinctly less physical than launching

when they moved non-rigidly. All other effects were non-

significant, F\1. Again, there were no group differences.

1The same results obtained for correlations between VIQ and

childrens accuracy, with only 3 of 45 correlations within and across

groups significant.2

ANOVA on categorical data is appropriate if proportions are not

extreme (e.g., Lunney 1970; Rosenthal and Rosnow 1984).


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The ambiguous events (involving a reaction followed by

a launch), received neutral scores close to 0 for the control

children, both with rigid and non-rigid motion. If the shapes

moved non-rigidly, the same appeared for children with

autism, but they gave distinctly more physical attributions

when the shapes moved rigidly. The corresponding

group 9 type of motion interaction was marginal,

F(1,39) = 3.26, MSe = 0.75, p = 0.07. All other effects inthe 2 group 9 2 type of motion ANOVA were non-signif-

icant. The physical interpretation given by children with

autism also appeared for younger typically developing

children in a prior study (Watts et al. 2007) while the neutral

score is closer to the pattern found for normal adults.

Individual response patterns confirm that children were

not guessing. In the autism group, 14 of 19 children per-

formed above chance, as did 17 of 22 control children (9 or

more correct in 14; binomial test, p = 0.017), and these

children made on average 2.92 and 2.88 errors only. Thus

individual and group performance corresponds.

Childrens deviations from the correct pattern typicallyinvolved errors on both causal and non-causal events, while

previous work had found that childrens errors were largely

restricted to non-causal events, with children over-attrib-

uting causality to these (Schlottmann et al. 2002). The

discrepancy, however, is largely an artefact of the event

selection here: 10 of 14 events were causal, so the likeli-

hood of errors on these was higher than on non-causal

events. Although less than 30% of stimuli were non-causal,

almost 40% of errors appeared for these events, rising to

67% for children with autism and to 72% for those in the

control group, if only children performing above chance

are considered. The same appears from Table 2, which

shows individual response patterns for the 8 main stimuli,

i.e., for a balanced event sample with half causal, half non-

causal stimuli. Nevertheless, about two-thirds of the errors

occurred for non-causal events, in agreement with previous

work. Thus children over-attributed causality in the present

study as well. No differences appeared in this between

children with autism and control children.

Overall, our results demonstrate intact perception ofcausality in children with autism, at both the group and

individual level. Performance was substantially better than

in Ray and Schlottmann (2007), with 70% correct choices

for children with autism, and 67% for normal controls,

across launch, reaction and delayed events, compared to

43% in the earlier study for children with autism, 44 and

55% for two control groups. Most importantly, in contrast

to Ray and Schlottmann (2007), children with autism had

no weakness on launch events in the present study, or on

various novel events that shared some features of

launching.

Animacy Perception

While causality perception was unimpaired, animacy per-

ception was impaired in the autism group. When first asked

what A and B looked like, only 37% of the children with

autism described the non-rigid agents as caterpillars,

snakes, slugs (see Table 3) while 42% described them

as inanimate, and 21% gave no answer. This contrasts with

77% animate and 23% inanimate descriptions for the

control children. After being told explicitly that the shapes

could be animate agents, all of the control children and

68% of children with autism described them as animate,

Table 2 Number of children with different response patterns (% in brackets) and total number of errors made by these children

Response patterns Autism group Control group

Number of

children (%)

Number of errors Number of

children (%)

Number of errors

On non causal

events

On causal

events

On non causal

events

On causal

events

Above chance level

performance

All correct 2 (11) 3 (14)

Errors on non-causal

events only

6 (31) 11 7 (31) 14

Errors on non-causal and

causal events

2 (11) 5 3 6 (27) 8 6

Errors on causal events

only

4 (21) 5 1 (5) 2

Chance level

performance

5 (26) 13 9 5 (23) 11 11

Total 19 29 (63%) 17 (37%) 22 33 (63%) 19 (37%)

Note: All correct refers to push responses for launch events, chase responses for reaction events, and non-causal responses to all delayed

events, regardless of whether the shape moved rigidly or non-rigidly. For comparability across studies, this Table2 considers only the 8 events

also used by Ray and Schlottmann (2007), Schlottmann et al. (2002) and Schlottmann et al. (2006)


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11% still gave no answer and 21% still described them as

inanimate.

For the statistical analysis inanimate or no descriptions

were coded as 0, animate descriptions as 1. The less frequent

occurrence of animate descriptions in children with autismwas reflected in a main effect of group, F(1,39) = 12.26,

MSe = 0.21, p = 0.001, in a 2 group 9 2 prompt ANOVA

on the animacy scores. The increased occurrence of animate

descriptions after prompting was reflected in the main effect

of prompt, F(1,39) = 14.71, MSe = 0.10, p\ 0.001. The

interaction was non-significant, F\ 1, i.e., both groups

improved to the same extent. These results were confirmed

non-parametrically, with significant group differences both

prior to and after prompting (Mann-Whitney U = 124.5,

p = 0.01, and U = 143, p = 0.005, respectively).

The overall correlation between VIQ and performance

was r = .341, p = .029, and although it did not reachsignificance for either group of children alone, we recom-

puted the analysis with VIQ as covariate and group as

between subjects factor. The group effect remained sig-

nificant, F(1,38) = 5.59, MSE = .110, p = .024, with

F\ 1 for the covariate. The same appeared when only the

prompted descriptions were considered, with F(1,38) =

6.87, MSE = .013, p = .013 for group, and F\ 1 for

the covariate. When only the spontaneous descrip-

tions were considered, however, neither VIQ, F\ 1, nor

group, F(1,38) = 2.34, MSE = .218, p = .135 reached

significance.

In sum, children with autism had difficulties in identi-

fying animal-like motion relative to control children. It

appears that these group differences, in part, but notcompletely, reflect VIQ differences between children with

and without autism.

Discussion

In this study, high-functioning children with autism (mean

VMA 9.7 years) perceived physical and social causal

Gestalts as well as matched children with typical devel-

opment, but had difficulty recognizing animacy in Michotte

(1946/1963) caterpillar stimulus. Both groups of children

responded in a mature fashion on the causality task, usingtemporal information to distinguish causal from non-causal

events and spatial information to differentiate physical

from social causality. Overall good performance indicates

that children did not have problems with the test itself, and

confirms that understanding of the pictures, movies and

procedure was adequate. Accordingly, the present animacy

deficit would seem to reflect more than just generally low

intellectual or verbal functioning in autism, despite some

remaining unclarity of interpretation, discussed below.

Table 3 Descriptions of non-

rigid agents before and after

prompting; animate responses in

bold

Control group Autism group

Before prompting/after prompting

1. Elastics, caterpillars

2. Caterpillars

3. Stripes/Caterpillars, snakes

4. Rectangles/Kangarooscaterpillars

5. Legs of a rabbit/Worms

6. Snake

7. Slugs

8. Snake

9. Rectangles/Snakes

10. They jump and expand/Caterpillars

11. It expands and contracts/Caterpillar, slug

12. Caterpillars

13. They runfrogs/Snakes

14. Worms

15. They runthey jumpsnakes

16. They run, caterpillars

17. Worms

18. Slugs

19. Snakes

20. Caterpillars

21. Accordion, running puma/Slug

22. Slugs

Before prompting/after prompting

1. Rectangles/Rectangles

2. Snakes



5. /Caterpillars

6. Snakes


8. Snakes

9. Slugs

10. Snakes



13. Worms

14. Worms or snakes


16. Rectangles/Caterpillars

17. /

18. /

19. /Snakes


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Launch Perception

Unimpaired perception of launch events in the present

study is in contrast to Ray and Schlottmanns (2007)

finding that children with autism performed at chance

level for launching. These authors argued that their

launch deficit could reflect a local processing bias

emerging with very brief visual information (Mottronand Belleville 1993), but in the present study, children

with autism had no difficulties with launching or other

stimuli representing physical interactions (entraining,

cued launching), and they preferred the physical inter-

pretation for an ambiguous event, like younger normal

children in Watts et al. (2007) study. The children here

clearly had a good grasp of physical causality in all its

manifestations.

Two factors could account for the difference in results,

the more elaborate verbal instructions or higher age of the

children here (9.6 VMA, 13.0 CA versus 5.1 VMA and 8.4

CA in the earlier study). That the language of theinstructions is in part responsible is suggested by the low

overall performance even for control children in Ray and

Schlottmann (2007); in the present study, performance was

higher and closer to that in Schlottmann et al. (2002). It

would thus seem that the 1- or 2-word language in Ray and

Schlottmann (2007) obscured the meaning of the task

somewhat. While some argue that perceptual causality is a

hardwired automatic reaction of the perceptual system

(Scholl and Tremoulet 2000), its measurement draws on

more cognitive processes (Schlottmann 2000) even in tasks

with low verbal demands. Note that the two VMA matched

groups here were both at a verbal level sufficient to cope

with the instructions, while the otherwise perceptual task

meant that beyond this there was no relationand there

should not be anybetween individual differences in PC

and VIQ, i.e., in verbal learning ability (rather than func-

tioning) of the children.

This account does not, of course, explain the specific

improvement found here for launch events. However,

launch perception might be even more verbally mediated

than reaction perception with the present method because

the picture for physical causality showed no contact

between the agents, to avoid matching based on spatial

contiguity rather than causality. This means, that physical

causality has to be recognised from a picture that does not

give a prototypical view of a collision, which might be

difficult for low functioning children with autism.

Although children with autism understand collisions in

picture sequences, with each image scaffolded by other

images (Baron Cohen et al. 1986), or in the present study

with the image scaffolded linguistically, in Ray and Sch-

lottmann (2007), a single atypical image had to be read

without such aids.

Alternatively, the specific improvement on launching

found here might be due to children with autism over-

coming an early impairment with brief stimuli as they grow

older. It is unlikely, however, that this is linked to a

developmental shift towards global processing of such

stimuli: A local processing bias in general (Happe and Frith

2006 for review), and of very brief stimuli in particular

(Mottron and Belleville 1993), has been reported at allages. Indeed, results for the Block design subtest of the

WISC-R, a measure of local processing, were available for

8 children in the present sample with autism, and a high

mean score of 10.88 (range 915), accompanied the global

causal perception.

Instead, the specific improvement in launching found

here relative to Ray and Schlottmann (2007) could be related

to developmental improvements in attention (Townsend

et al. 1996; Allen and Courchesne 2001). Attentional pro-

cesses in young children with autism might be described as

obligatory, with difficulties in voluntary disengagement,

as in infants (Stechler and Latz 1966; Hood et al. 1998).Young children with autism show slow attention shifting and

have problems in disengaging attention from one of two

competing stimuli (Landry and Bryson 2004). Slow atten-

tional orienting is a distinct deficit in autism at all ages, but

more pronounced in children (Harris et al. 1999), which

could explain why younger children with autism in Ray and

Schlottmann (2007), but not our older children, had prob-

lems with launch perception. The present study included

events designed to test the attentional account of weak

launch perception. Since children had no difficulty with

these events, they might be useful in future tests with

younger samples. Work with eye tracking methods might

also be useful to illuminate attentional processes in PC.

Reaction Perception

The finding that children with autism are not impaired in

reaction perception confirmed previous studies (Bowler

and Thommen 2000; Ray and Schlottmann 2007), but with

a test more sensitive to any potential deficit. This lack of

impairment contrasts with their difficulties in everyday

social interactions and social descriptions of more complex

animations (Klin 2000; Bowler and Thommen 2000).

This contrast suggests that perception of causality at a

distance is not directly related to social or mental state

reasoning found for more complex animations. This may

be because perception of reaction causality does not require

mental state attribution. Even normal adults often describe

reaction events with goal-directed rather than mental state

language (Schlottmann et al. 2006), but children with

autism use goal-directed language also to describe com-

plex animations that normal subjects describe in mental

state terms (Abell et al. 2000; Castelli et al. 2002).


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Neuroimaging studies also suggest differences in social

perception of complex and simple animations, with the

medial prefrontal cortex activated in studies of the former

(Castelli et al. 2002) but not the latter (Blakemore et al.

2003; Blakemore et al. 2001). Simple causal interactions

may directly relate to immediate, visible goals, with clear

meaning for children with autism, as suggested by work

on imitation of simple goal-directed actions on objects(Vivanti et al. 2008), and on perception of schematic

interactions involving geometrical shapes (Abell et al.

2000; Castelli et al. 2002; Klin 2000). But similar inter-

actions embedded in complex sequences may relate to

higher order social goals, requiring processes of social and

mental state attribution not directly accessible to people

with autism.

Unimpaired reaction perception would not seem to fit

with the idea that perception of causality might support

developing social/mental state understanding. However,

late proficiency does not rule out delayed emergence: If

children with autism lack reaction perception during earlyinfancy this might still contribute to later social deficits. To

evaluate this possibility would require testing of younger

children with autism, children even younger than in Ray

and Schlottmann (2007) to check for very early anomalies

in reaction perception.

Animacy Perception

A second aspect of social perception in our study was the

perception of animacy. Many have treated the perception

of animacy and of social causality or intentionality and

goal-directedness as more or less equivalent (e.g., Scholl

and Tremoulet 2000; Rutherford et al. 2006), however, one

concerns the nature of the agents, the other the interpre-

tation of the events in which they engage. From knowledge

about the event one might infer the identity of the agents,

and conversely, the identity of the agents gives clues as to

the type of event they likely engage in, but nevertheless,

agent identification and event interpretation are not con-

ceptually identical and can, as in this study, appear

empirically distinct (see the current debate on how infants

understand the social world, e.g., Biro and Leslie 2007;

Gergely and Csibra 2003; Luo and Baillargeon 2005).

Perception of animacy from pattern of motion is usually

studied with point-light stimuli (Johansson 1973), but can

emerge also in artificial schematic displays, as originally

suggested by (Michotte 1946/1963; also see Scholl and

Tremoulet 2000). In our study, children with autism were

impaired in the identification of Michottes caterpillar as

animate. This fits with previous work showing behavioural

impairments and differences in neural processing of point-

light biological motion in autism (Blake et al. 2003; Freitag

et al. 2007; Herrington et al. 2007; Klin et al. 2003; Klin

and Jones 2008). One possible explanation is that this

deficit might be related to atypical global processing (Da-

kin and Frith 2005; Pellicano et al. 2005). The present data

would seem to also suggest an impairment for the sche-

matic motion of geometric shapes, as studied here. This

artificial form of biological motion may not appear eco-

logically valid, but adults (Schlottmann et al. 2006), and

typically developing children from 3 years (Schlottmannet al. 2002) have strong impressions of animacy for these

stimuli. Moreover, infants as young as 6 months already

treat the motion of such caterpillars towards one of two

goals as animate (Schlottmann and Ray 2009). Further

studies would seem warranted on the perception of both

naturalistic and artificial biological motion in autism.

The animacy deficit found here may be in part a per-

ceptual deficit and in part a verbal learning deficit. Our

animacy task was more verbal than our causality task, it

correlated with VIQ, and VIQ differences accounted in part

for the group differences in spontaneous, though not

prompted animacy responses. Children with autism andcontrol children were at a matched level of verbal func-

tioning (VMA) but differed in CA and in VIQ relative to

CA age norms, i.e., children with autism had learning

difficulties and slower rate of intellectual development

(Jarrold and Brock 2004). We thus have to allow for the

possibility that, despite equivalent level of verbal func-

tioning, these verbal learning difficulties per se might make

it more difficult for children with autism to find an

appropriate verbal description for the unfamiliar non-rigid

stimuli presented here and to refrain from an overly literal

interpretation of the question (what do the red and blue

look like?like rectangles). Nevertheless, the group dif-

ference in animacy perception remained even after

prompting, and VIQ did not affect this at all, so the ani-

macy deficit clearly goes beyond a difficulty with learning

to describe novel visual stimuli.

While children with autism found it more difficult than

controls to perceive the non-rigid stimuli as animate,

prompting increased their socially causal attributions as

much as for control children. Similarly, in Rutherford et al.

(2006) children with autism, when taught to distinguish

animate from inanimate shapes based on motion cues

suggesting internal versus external energy sources even-

tually performed at the same level as control children, but

took significantly longer to learn. Both findings fit either

with the view that children with autism orient less towards

social information, even if they can process this informa-

tion (Dawson et al. 1998), or that they engage in strategic

compensation to make up for deficient perception. The

strategic compensation view is perhaps more plausible here

than in Rutherford et al.s (2006) study, because our

sample was older and because we provided verbal prompts

and verbal feedback about the correct interpretation.


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Children might have found it easier to access the impli-

cations of animacy for the causal interpretation from the

verbal information rather than from the visual displays.

All in all, differences appeared between spontaneous

and prompted animacy perceptions, and between animacy

perceptions and perception of social causality involving

these animates, all pertaining to the same animated stimuli

and measured in the same children. These differenceshighlight that social perception is not a unitary process.

Our findings point to a need for finer grained conceptual

analysis of which aspects of social perception might be

impaired in autism, to go hand in hand with process

analysis.

Conclusions

In the present study children with high-functioning autism

showed unimpaired perception of causality of launch,

reaction and related events. This confirms previous findings

of intact reaction perception (Ray and Schlottmann 2007)and suggests that the launch deficit that appears for

younger children with autism (Ray and Schlottmann 2007)

can be overcome with age or more articulated verbal

instructions. This does not rule out a link between PC and

autism, but this will need to be explored in much younger

children. This also does not rule out lingering deficits in

older children, if a more complex task drawing on PC is

used. However, the more complex the task, the more dif-

ficult it becomes to separate the contributions of PC proper

from those of the ancillary skills involved in expressing

this causality and reasoning about it.

The present study also found that children with autism

were impaired in recognizing the animacy of artificial

animal motion. This finding extends previous work show-

ing that children with autism have problems with biological

motion processing. When told how to interpret the motion

pattern, children with autism could nevertheless understand

the implication of this motion for causality attributions as

well as normal controls. This strengthens our above view

that causality perception per se is unimpaired. It also

suggests that high-functioning children with autism, might

be able to compensate for any problems of animacy per-

ception, or of orienting towards such stimuli, at a more

strategic level.

Our findings could have implications for intervention.

Animations are usually attractive for children with autism

and can be used for simplified representation of interac-

tions between agents. This could be a way to provide rel-

evant social information to them while avoiding some of

the aversive features of realistic social stimulation. The

present results suggest, however, that careful attention is

needed to the type of social information provided through

animation, as deficits may extend into this domain. The

development of perceptual causality and animacy in autism

is a fascinating topic for study, because it has the potential

to illuminate the involvement of some basic processes of

social perception in this disorder. Conversely, what we

may learn from children with autism may help us better

understand these basic processes.

Acknowledgments This paper is based on SCs doctoral disserta-tion submitted to the University of Siena. SC was supported by a

doctoral fellowship of Regione Sardegna and by the University of

Siena, AS and ER were supported by ESRC grant R000230198. Many

thanks to the children and parents involved, in particular to Giacomo

Vivanti for his comments and his help in testing children with autism,

to the staff at the Neuropsychiatry Unit at the Hospital in Siena, and

LAquila, to the staff at the Quartu S.E. primary school, and to Luca

Surian for discussion.

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