Action Evaluation and Discrimination as Indexes of Imitation Fidelity in Autism

This chapter introduces kinematics-based assessment tools to quantify imitation in general. The work is presented as part of a research program that aims at unveiling possible links between motor dysfunction and impairments in social interactions. Several examples of the use of these kinematic metrics and accompanying paradigms are presented that involve important components of the social exchange. These examples and methods are discussed in light of diagnostics tools, such as the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule and Autism Diagnostic Interview- Revised, that openly disregard sensory-motor issues in autism spectrum disorder. Paradoxically, these observational tools provide ordinal scores of social tasks that inherently require proper sensory-motor integration and both overt and covert forms of imitation for their successful completion. As such, the tools provided in this chapter may pave the way toward combining such observational tests with objective methods to eventually link subsets of imitation tasks inherently present in sociomotor behavior with the types of communication exchange such tasks inevitably require.