Sensorimotor Development

Question 1

Who highlighted the importance of sensorimotor skills for development?

Answer 1

Piaget

Question 2

proprioception

Answer 2

awareness of where your body is in space in relation to other things in the environment

Question 3

List of the kind of skills which need intact sensorimotor processing

Answer 3

• Walking
• ‘Clumsiness’
• Hand/eye coordination
• Reading
• Writing
  Coordinating eye contact with speech and gesture during a conversation

Question 4

5 parts of model

Answer 4

1. Sensory systems
2. State estimation
3. Inverse model (planning/ control)
4. Forward Model (predictor)
5. Motor execution

Question 5

What parts of model can go wrong

Answer 5

Sensory systems
Forward model
Inverse model

Question 6

What parts of model involve learning

Answer 6

Forward model
State estimation
Inverse model

Question 7

Disorders of sensorimotor development

Answer 7

ASD
Developmental Coordination Disorder / Dyspraxia

Question 8

link between ASD and dyspraxia

Answer 8

• Adults with autism significantly more likely to have DCD/dyspraxia (6.9%) than the gen pop (0.8%)
• Adults with DCD/dyspraxia have significantly higher autistic traits and lower empathy than controls (self-reported)
• Sensorimotor skills important for social skills and empathy

Question 9

Motor difficulties associated with difficulties in

Answer 9

• imitation (Mostofsky et al. 2006)
  
  • speech sound production (Page and Boucher, 1998)
  • Emotion recognition (Cummins et al. 2005)
  • Anxiety in response to social interaction (Batt et al. 2011)
• Many of these studies not with autistic people

Question 10

Motor difficulties in autism

Answer 10

• 80% of autistic people have definite motor difficulties, and an additional 10% are borderline (Green et al. 2009)
  • Motor delays tend to be reported by parents as first area of concern at 14.7 months (Chawarska et al. 2007)

Question 11

Sensory difficulties in autism

Answer 11

• Proprioceptive impairment (determining where body is in space) (Blanche et al. 2012)
  
  • Increased rates of synaesthesia (where one sensory modality triggers another) (Baron-Cohen et al. 2013)

Question 12

Weak Central Coherence (or strong local coherence)

Answer 12

this theory argued that autistic people have a bias in processing the local details over the global whole when perceiving and interpreting information

Question 13

Coping with uncertainty

Answer 13

• Sensory difficulties and RRBs appear related
• Can have huge impact on families

Question 14

Sensorimotor integration in autism

Answer 14

• Eye movements:
  
  • less accurate when moving eyes to a new target (Schmitt et al. 2013)
  • Slower to initiate an eye movement (Wilkes et al. 2015)
• Rubber hand illusion
  
  • Autistic children less susceptible than typically developing controls
  • Delayed susceptibility to the illusion (6 minutes)
  • Reduced empathy = less susceptible
• Reduced ability to integrate visual and tactile information

Question 15

Modifying the forward model

Answer 15

• Autistic people can learn new motor skills, and modify the forward model, but it takes longer
• Also appears to improve with age (e.g. adults more susceptible to rubber hand illusion)

Question 16

Biological basis

Answer 16

• Cerebellum could play a key role:
  
  • Saccadic accuracy has been connected to error-reducing function of the cerebellum
  • Cerebellum volume associated with difficulties incorporating visual cues in motor learning