Researchers from the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have collaborated to uncover important new insights into the neurological basis of autism.

Their new study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, examined patterns of movement as children with autism and typically developing children learned to control a novel tool.

The findings suggest that children with autism appear to learn new actions differently than do typically
developing children. As compared to their typically developing peers, children with autism relied much more on their own internal sense of body position (proprioception), rather than visual information coming from the external world to learn new patterns of movement.

Furthermore, researchers found that the greater the reliance on proprioception, the greater the child’s impairment in social skills, motor skills and imitation.

Previous research has shown that children with autism have difficulty with motor skills, which appears to be associated with abnormalities in how the brain learns motor actions.

To study the models formed in the brain when children with autism learn a new movement, researchers measured patterns of generalization as 14 children with autism and 13 typically developing children learned to reach using a novel tool. They then examined how well children were able to generalize what they learned in two separate ways — one that detected how much they relied on visual information to guide learning and one that detected how much they relied on proprioceptive information to guide learning.

BRAIN WIRING

The study findings also provide support for observations from previous studies suggesting that autism may be associated with abnormalities in the wiring of the brain; specifically, with overdevelopment of short range white matter connections between neighboring brain regions and underdevelopment of longer distance connections between distant brain regions.

“These findings not only demonstrate why children with autism have difficulty learning motor skills, but also provide real insight into why these children have difficulty learning to interact with the world around them,” said Dr. Reza Shadmehr, senior study author and Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine. “If the way their brain is wired is not allowing them to rely as much as typically developing children on external visual
cues to guide behavior, they may have difficulty learning how to interact with other people and interpret the nature of other people’s actions.” (www.kennedykrieger.org.)