Study On Biological Motion Processing In Undergraduates With Autistic Traits

Objective It is known that people with autism spectrum disorders(ASD)generally have deficit in social cognitive dysfunction and inability to effectively use social cues in contextual environment,which would cause huge social problems in their daily life.The biological motion,which is regarded as one of the most common social cues,has important role in social interaction.Then,what would people with autistic traits do when facing biological motion? Foreign researchers have already taken the first step in this domain,while there is little seen on domestic.This research tries to verify people with high levels of autistic traits have poor ability to perceive biological motion.Methods All the subjects were sophomores studying in some university.1000 students filled out the AQ(autism spectrum quotient)to get their AQ scores.We found 35 lowest scores and 35 highest scores from these students to undertake the discrimination task.The students who scored higher than 130 points were high autistic traits students and those who scored lower than 100 points were control group.The experiments are composed of two parts,which are intact biological motion discrimination task and scrambled biological motion discrimination task.The intact biological motion discrimination task has social cue in it,while the scrambled biological motion discrimination task does not.The statistical variables were PSE and DL.PSE represents the subjects’ sensitivity to the biological motion and DL represents subjects’ sensitivity to the task.When PSE <0,it means subjects prefer to choose biological motion stimuli compared with non-biological motion.Whereas PSE>0, subjects prefer to choose non-biological motion.DL represents the sensitivity subjects to the task.The smaller DL is the more sensitive subjects are to the task.Results In intact biological motion task,compared with control group’s PSE,which is(-0.079±0.250),there was a significant difference between control group and high-autistictraits(t=-2.796,p<0.05).There was no significant difference between control group’s PSE and the point of objective equality,which is 0,(t=-1.668,p=0.104).While compared with the point of objective equality,there was a significant positive PSE(0.104±0.252)for high-autistic-traits(t=2.434,p<0.05).In scrambled biological motion task,there is no significant difference between control group’s PSE(-0.079±0.250)and high-autistic-trait’s PSE(-0.083±0.306)(t=0.061,p=0.951).When compared with the point of objective equality “0”,neither control group(t=-1.861,p=0.104)nor high-autistic-traits(t=-1.599,p=0.119)could contribute a significant difference.DL has no significant difference between control group and high autistic trait students in both discrimination task.Conclusion In intact biological motion task,high-autistic-traits’ PSE was higher than control group’s PSE with significant difference,which means there was a deficit in people with high level of autistic traits perceiving intact biological motion.Compared with the point of objective equality,there was a significant difference in high-autistic-trait’s PSE,suggesting a temporal contraction effect of upright intact biological motion sequences in high-autistic-traits.In scrambled biological motion task,there was no significant difference between low-autistic-traits and high-autistic-traits,suggesting that highautistic-traits can perceive scrambled biological motion properly.Combined with 2 experiments,autistic traits can affect perceiving biological motion with social information.And social information decides the ability to perceive biological motion.It means that people with high autistic traits may have deficit in social cognition.