Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Neural underpinnings of iconic gesture comprehension in autistic adults
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Hannah O'Connor1, Arielle S. Keller1, Inge-Marie Eigsti1; 1University of Connecticut
Gestures are spontaneous hand movements that accompany speech, contributing semantic and pragmatic context to language and supporting social interaction. The theory of embodied cognition suggests that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s physical interaction within the world and are thus shaped by an individual’s sensory and motor abilities. Under this theory, gestures are a physical representation of thought content, and perceiving gestures as part of social communication requires physical coding. While a large body of literature demonstrates differences in the quantity and quality of autistic people’s gesture production during spontaneous speech, few studies have examined their gesture comprehension; however, several studies to date suggest that autistic individuals, even those with fluent verbal skills, experience challenges in perceiving and understanding gestures. Given evidence of the relationship between gestures and cognitive functioning in typical development, autistic difficulties with gesture comprehension are likely to have important consequences for interpersonal interactions and cognitive functioning. Furthermore, autistic individuals display impairments in the efficiency of auditory-visual (AV) integration (and, indeed, of gesture-speech integration) compared to neurotypical peers. The proposed study will test for group differences in the neural circuitry underlying hypothesized behavioral differences, to better understand the mechanisms contributing to impairments of co-speech gesture processing in autism. We will examine functional brain activation in autistic and non-autistic young adults (25 per group) ages 18-45 years, matched for non-verbal cognitive ability, as they view iconic gestures (i.e., hand movements that represent objects and events). We will test for group differences in responding to the integration of AV information. Participants will complete a single-word semantic categorization task (e.g., “Is this something you do in the kitchen?’) in the scanner, with three conditions: gesture-only, speech-only, and gesture + speech. Participants will also complete out-of-scanner tasks to capture cognitive, language, and motor abilities, as well as a non-semantic flash-beep AV integration task. We predict (1) lower accuracy and (2) slower RT on gesture+speech trials for the autism group relative to other conditions and relative to neurotypical participants, given prior evidence of AV integration impairments. We predict (3) increased activity in brain regions important for multimodal integration (superior temporal gyrus/sulcus) in the neurotypical group and (4) increased activation in sensorimotor regions such as the primary visual and auditory areas for the autism group. In addition, we predict that (5) individual differences in language and motor skills, low-level AV integration, and autism characteristics will be associated with gesture/speech activation. Situated in the embodied cognition framework, the proposed study has the potential to illuminate audio and visual processing in the context of social communication and will inform interventions aimed at enhancing social communication in autism.
Topic Areas: Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration, Disorders: Developmental