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Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults

Earlier research demonstrated robust cerebellar involvement in sequencing, including high-level social information sequencing that requires mental state attributions, termed mentalizing. Earlier research also found cerebellar deficiencies in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) which are characterized by...

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Autores principales: Heleven, Elien, Bylemans, Tom, Ma, Qianying, Baeken, Chris, Baetens, Kris
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9486458/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36147543
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2022.946482
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author Heleven, Elien
Bylemans, Tom
Ma, Qianying
Baeken, Chris
Baetens, Kris
author_facet Heleven, Elien
Bylemans, Tom
Ma, Qianying
Baeken, Chris
Baetens, Kris
author_sort Heleven, Elien
collection PubMed
description Earlier research demonstrated robust cerebellar involvement in sequencing, including high-level social information sequencing that requires mental state attributions, termed mentalizing. Earlier research also found cerebellar deficiencies in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) which are characterized by social difficulties. However, studies on high-level social sequencing functionality by persons with ASD are almost non-existent. In this study, we, therefore, perform a comparison between behavioral performances of high-functioning ASD and neurotypical participants on the Picture and Verbal Sequencing Tasks. In these tasks, participants are requested to put separate events (depicted in cartoon-like pictures or behavioral sentences, respectively) in their correct chronological order. To do so, some of these events require understanding of high-level social beliefs, of social routines (i.e., scripts), or nonsocial mechanical functionality. As expected, on the Picture Sequencing task, we observed longer response times for persons with ASD (in comparison with neurotypical controls) when ordering sequences requiring an understanding of social beliefs and social scripts, but not when ordering nonsocial mechanical events. This confirms our hypotheses that social sequence processing is impaired in ASD. The verbal version of this task did not reveal differences between groups. Our results are the first step toward new theoretical insights for social impairments of persons with ASD. They highlight the importance of taking into account sequence processing, and indirectly the cerebellum when investigating ASD difficulties.
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spelling pubmed-94864582022-09-21 Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults Heleven, Elien Bylemans, Tom Ma, Qianying Baeken, Chris Baetens, Kris Front Behav Neurosci Behavioral Neuroscience Earlier research demonstrated robust cerebellar involvement in sequencing, including high-level social information sequencing that requires mental state attributions, termed mentalizing. Earlier research also found cerebellar deficiencies in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) which are characterized by social difficulties. However, studies on high-level social sequencing functionality by persons with ASD are almost non-existent. In this study, we, therefore, perform a comparison between behavioral performances of high-functioning ASD and neurotypical participants on the Picture and Verbal Sequencing Tasks. In these tasks, participants are requested to put separate events (depicted in cartoon-like pictures or behavioral sentences, respectively) in their correct chronological order. To do so, some of these events require understanding of high-level social beliefs, of social routines (i.e., scripts), or nonsocial mechanical functionality. As expected, on the Picture Sequencing task, we observed longer response times for persons with ASD (in comparison with neurotypical controls) when ordering sequences requiring an understanding of social beliefs and social scripts, but not when ordering nonsocial mechanical events. This confirms our hypotheses that social sequence processing is impaired in ASD. The verbal version of this task did not reveal differences between groups. Our results are the first step toward new theoretical insights for social impairments of persons with ASD. They highlight the importance of taking into account sequence processing, and indirectly the cerebellum when investigating ASD difficulties. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-09-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9486458/ /pubmed/36147543 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2022.946482 Text en Copyright © 2022 Heleven, Bylemans, Ma, Baeken and Baetens. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Behavioral Neuroscience
Heleven, Elien
Bylemans, Tom
Ma, Qianying
Baeken, Chris
Baetens, Kris
Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults
title Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults
title_full Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults
title_fullStr Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults
title_full_unstemmed Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults
title_short Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults
title_sort impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults
topic Behavioral Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9486458/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36147543
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2022.946482
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