Biological motion and the animate-inanimate distinction in children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder

The current study examined whether children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HF-ASD) preferentially attend to point-light displays of biological, compared to mechanical motion. We hypothesized that children's attentional patterns toward the motion of living things would be reduced compared to typically developing (TD) children. Children also completed two categorization tasks measuring the animate-inanimate distinction. Children with HF-ASD were matched with TD children (n = 18 per group) on age, gender, and verbal ability. Overall, children with HF-ASD attended to biological and non-biological motion equally, whereas TD children demonstrated a preference for inanimate motion. Children with HF-ASD were also unimpaired in the formation of animate and inanimate concepts. Among children with HF-ASD, a link between attention to motion and categorization ability was observed, but only for inanimate objects. TD and HF-ASD groups differed in that visual exploration of the motion videos (e.g., saccades) was related to animate-inanimate categorization only among children with HF-ASD. These results are discussed as a low-level test of the social attention/orienting hypothesis.