Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability, characterized by social impairments, repetitive behaviors and restricted interest. Synchronization is an important mechanism in the coordination of social interaction, which has an important impact on people's social communication and interpersonal relationships. A large number of studies have shown that children with autism have greater variability in sensorimotor synchronization, and the level of spontaneous synchronization in the process of interpersonal motor synchronization is low. These will affect their relationship with their peers and caregivers, and may adversely affect the development of their future social cognition. However, there are relatively few studies on sensorimotor synchronization in children with autism, and the influencing factors and the cognitive factors behind their synchronization performance are still unclear. Therefore, this study focused on the sensorimotor synchronization of children with autism, and explored three factors that affect the synchronization performance of children with autism.Experiment 1 used tapping as the experimental paradigm to explore the effect of the length of the sound stimulation time interval on the sensorimotor synchronization in children with autism. We selected 21 autistic children aged 5-8 years and 21 typically developing children to explore the influence of the inter-stimulus interval on the performance of autistic children. Experiment 2 added visual stimuli on the basis of Experiment 1, to explore the influence of multi-sensory integration on sensorimotor synchronization of children with autism, and compared the performance of children with autism under two conditions of single channel and audio-visual double channels. On the basis of the first two experiments, Experiment 3 added social stimulus cues to explore the influence of social stimulus and non-social stimulus on the synchronization performance of children with autism.The main results of this paper: (1) Under the condition of short inter-stimuli interval, the synchronization performance of autistic children is equivalent to typically developing children; a long inter-stimuli interval will induce more unstable sensorimotor synchronization, and the synchronization performance of autistic children under all metrics is significant worse than typically developing children. (2) Multi-sensory integration can promote the performance of two groups. Among them, child with ASD have a certain ability to integrate low-level audiovisual stimulus, but they still have integration defects compared with typically developing children. (3) Compared with social stimulation, non-social stimulation has a greater effect on the performance of the two groups of children. This may be because the anthropomorphic robot NAO can stimulate the intrinsic motivation of the two groups.These results indicate that three factors, inter-stimuli interval, multi-sensory integration, and (non-)social stimulation, affect the synchronization performance of children with autism. The longer the inter-stimuli interval, the more difficult the synchronization of children with ASD; multi-sensory integration can promote the synchronization of children with ASD; compared with social stimulation, non-social stimulation has a greater role in promoting the synchronization performance of autistic children. This result is of great help for us to understand the cognitive factors of sensorimotor synchronization in children with autism, and it is also of great significance for future intervention training.
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