Recent research has confirmed that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in recognizing emotions from body movements. Difficulties in perceiving coherent motion are also common in ASD. Yet it is unknown whether these two impairments are related. Thirteen adults with ASD and 16 age- and IQ-matched typically developing…

The ability to understand another person's action and, if needed, to imitate that action, is a core component of human social behaviour. Imitation skills have attracted particular attention in the search for the underlying causes of the social difficulties that characterize autism. In recent years, it has been reported that people with autism can…

Movement interference occurs when concurrently observing and executing incompatible actions and is believed to be due to co-activation of conflicting populations of mirror neurons. It has also been suggested that mirror neurons contribute towards the imitation of observed actions. However, the exact neural substrate of imitation may depend on task…

In individuals with autism or autism-spectrum-disorder (ASD), conflicting results have been reported regarding the processing of biological motion tasks. As biological motion perception and recognition might be related to impaired imitation, gross motor skills and autism specific psychopathology in individuals with ASD, we performed a functional…