Motor Imagery and Motor Coordination in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Similarities and Differences

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are composed by a variety of developmental deficits, such as problems in verbal communication and repetitive behaviours. Together with these social deficits, the recent literature has reported difficulties in motor coordination during the everyday life of children and adolescents with ASD. These motor deficits could be linked to a possible alteration of motor simulation processes in ASD but just a few studies attempted to directly compare motor imagery tasks and actual motor coordination within these disorders and specifically using the same task. In a recent study, the relationship between explicit motor imagery and motor execution has been investigated within the same experimental paradigm. The authors employed a spatial bimanual task called “circles-lines” task where participants are asked to draw with one hand (i.e., baseline), either hands (i.e., bimanual task) or try to imagine the movements with one hand while simultaneously draw with the other (i.e., imagery task). This task is a prototype of a complex bimanual skill and shows how these two processes can be studied together within the same paradigm. In particular, results of the study highlighted how motor imagery and motor coordination only partially follow the same path of development in ASD. Indeed, ASD participants showed much lower results in the motor imagery task in comparison to the performance in actual bimanual task, which was similar to the typically developed controls. In conclusion, the data show that motor imagery and actual coordination, even though interrelated processes which share similar brain areas, can be dissociated in ASD where development of spatial coordination consolidates earlier than motor imagery