Thursday, August 13, 2009

Autism, motion and body language

Researchers from Durham University in the U.K. have been looking into the way people with autism perceive movement and body language. They showed adults with autism and an unaffected control group short video clips of body movement and the participants had to identify the emotions being displayed. The clips had no images of faces or sound. Autistic people had more trouble in identifying the emotions in the clips and also did poorly in a task in which they had to determine the direction of a group of dots on a computer screen. The study suggests that visual processing problems and a difficulty in perceiving or attending to motion could explain some of the problems autistic people have in interpreting body language.

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=news&id=121114&cn=20

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