Predicting ensuing actions in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

This study investigated the ability to predict others’ action in a group of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (n = 18). Their performance was compared with a group of children with mental retardation (n = 13) and a group of children with typical development (n = 19). Participants were presented with short incomplete videotaped movies showing an actor executing familiar and non-familiar actions. When asked to predict the outcome, participants with ASD produced fewer correct responses and their performance did not improve for familiar actions, as compared to both comparison groups. In addition, they committed a greater number of errors of temporal inversion. These results provide new evidence that an impaired means-end analysis process, leading to a diminished sensitivity to the sequence structure of goal-directed actions, would disrupt the ability to understand and predict others’ actions. The comprehension of abnormalities in event knowledge provides a better insight of some of the problems that individuals with ASD encounter in spontaneously understanding real-life social situations.