Behavioral Characteristics of Children with High Functioning Pervasive Developmental Disorders during a Game

BACKGROUND: To evaluate children’s sociability through their behavior, we compared the motion features of children with high functioning pervasive developmental disorders (HFPDD) and typical development (TD) during a game. We selected ‘Jenga’ as the game because this is an interactive game played by two people. METHODS: We observed the behavior of 7 children with HFPDD and 10 children with TD. An optical motion capture system was used to follow the movement of 3-dimensional position markers attached to caps worn by the players. RESULTS: The range of head motion of the children with HFPDD was narrower than that of the control group, especially in the X-axis direction (perpendicular to the line connecting the two players). In each game, we calculated the range of motion in the X-axis of each child and divided that figure by the matched adult player’s range. The average ratios of children with HFPDD and TD were 0.64 and 0.89 (number of games are 61 and 18), and the difference of these two ratios is significant (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: This ratio has sensitivity to identify HFPDD children and could be useful in their child care.