Both the mirror and the affordance systems might be impaired in adults with high autistic traits. Evidence from EEG mu and beta rhythms

The association of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with an altered mirror neuron system is still controversial. At the same time, the processing of object affordances by persons with ASD is a neglected issue. In this electroencephalographic study, adults differing in their autism quotient (AQ) scores were selected. We found anomalous modulation of mu and beta rhythms in high‐AQ, compared to low‐AQ persons, while they watched a set of goal‐directed manual actions. This confirms that observing actions involving implicit intentions most clearly reveals the impairment of the mirror neurons system (MNS). The high‐AQ group also showed anomalous mu and beta modulation when they looked at pictures of manipulable objects, indicating a deficit in processing motor affordances. We conclude that high‐AQ adults have neural impairment of both the MNS and the affordance systems, which could underlie their relational problems with both people and objects. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1032–1042. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Autism Research

• Publication date

  2019-07-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/aur.2121PMID 31066522
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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