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Abstract:
Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by severe
difficulties in social interaction and executive functions. A
number of studies have shown that autistic individuals are impaired
in understanding intentional stories despite a preserved ability to
understand stories depicting mechanical or physical events.
Goal-oriented actions differ from both mechanical and intentional
events in that they are represented in memory as sequences of
structured events sharing the same goal. In the present experiment,
autistic children (n=16) were presented with series of five
pictures depicting component actions of familiar activities and
requested to reconstruct the correct event sequences with regard to
the stated goals provided by the experimenter. They were compared
with Down's syndrome children (n=15) and normal children (n=20). In
one condition, children ability to sort the relevant events was
challenged by presenting concurrently actions belonging to four
different familiar activities. In the other condition, the same
sequences were presented separately in order to minimize working
memory demands. Autistic children were impaired in organizing
goal-directed events in their correct sequence in both conditions,
while they had no difficulty in identifying the single events and
including them in their appropriate context. We suggest that an
impairment in the ability to represent human actions as structured
sequences of goal-oriented events might contribute to explain
social and executive dysfunctions in autism.
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