Action semantic deficits are associated with impaired motor skills in autistic adults without intellectual impairment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Several studies indicate the functional importance of the motor cortex for higher cognition, language \n24 and semantic processing, and place the neural substrate of these processes in sensorimotor action25 perception circuits linking motor, sensory and perisylvian language regions. Interestingly, in \n26 individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), semantic processing of action and emotion words \n27 seems to be impaired and is associated with hypoactivity of the motor cortex during semantic \n28 processing. In this study, the relationship between semantic processing, fine motor skills and clinical \n29 symptoms was investigated in 19 individuals with ASD and 22 typically-developing matched \n30 controls. Participants completed two semantic decision tasks involving words from different semantic \n31 categories, a test of alexithymia (the Toronto Alexithymia Scale), and a test of fine motor skills (the \n32 Purdue Pegboard Test). A significant Group x Word Category interaction in accuracy (p < .05) \n33 demonstrated impaired semantic processing for action words, but not object words in the autistic \n34 group. There was no significant group difference when processing abstract emotional words or \n35 abstract neutral words. Moreover, our study revealed deficits in fine motor skills as well as evidence \n36 for alexithymia in the ASD group, but not in neurotypical controls. However, these motor deficits \n37 did not correlate significantly with impairments in action-semantic processing. We interpret the \n38 data in terms of an underlying dysfunction of the action-perception system in ASD and its specific \n39 impact on semantic language processing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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 teacher head, 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".