More than flattery: exploring imitative ability in children with autism spectrum disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research indicates that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty imitating the behaviour of others. Within the area of object-directed imitation, the presence or absence of a clear goal or outcome may facilitate or hinder imitative ability. The current study investigated imitation in five children ages 5 to 10 years with ASD. Imitation tasks were adapted from Rogers et al. (2010). Imitation actions were incidental to the goal and classified as functional or nonfunctional: functional actions and objects had a tangible outcome with sensory feedback while nonfunctional actions had no tangible outcome. Information about participants' developmental level, motor ability, language skills, adaptive behaviour, and social functioning were also collected through parent questionnaires. Contrary to previous findings, children in this sample did not imitate functional actions more successfully than non-functional actions. Scatterplots of variables suggested positive relationships between imitation and social functioning, motor skills, developmental level, and language skills. With the exception of one participant, individual case analyses revealed that participants were able to at least partially imitate the majority of the tasks despite generally low developmental and social functioning. Observations are discussed within the context of the existing literature and implications for school and clinical interventions for ASD are also addressed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".