Originally discovered in the monkey's ventral premotor area, mirror neurons constitute a particular type of cell that discharges both during execution and observation of the same or similar action. Since their discovery, numerous studies in humans have shown that when observing someone performing an action, our motor system covertly replicates (i.e. simulates) the observed action with high temporal and muscular fidelity, pointing to the existence of a similar mirror system in human primates. This system is thought to play a key role in action comprehension and anticipation, allowing individuals to effectively engage in social interactions on a daily basis.
Social communicative impairments, including deficits in predicting and comprehending other people’s actions, are considered to be among the core deficits associated with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). It has been suggested that these impairments could be explained in terms of a dysfunction in this “mirror system” (i.e. the broken mirror hypothesis of ASD). While this theory has received considerable attention during the last decade, recent research provides contradictory evidence, with studies reporting either preserved or abnormal activity within this system, and overall suggesting that a dysfunction in this system by itself is unable to give a complete account of ASD symptomatology.
Furthermore, so far, ASD social communicative deficits have been traditionally studied by using non-realistic stimuli embedded in abstract tasks (e.g. observation of hands detached from background) or through standard office-based neuropsychological tests. These tasks are not good models of the world because they lack the contextual cues that are present in everyday-life situations in which ASD individuals are mostly impaired. Thus, a critical aspect that has so far been neglected concerns the context-embedded nature of other’s actions perception. In other words, body movements are not perceived in isolation, but with objects, actors, and the relationships amongst them ‘gluing together’ into a unifying scene. Although contextual processing during action comprehension has been successfully studied in other disorders (e.g. schizophrenia), much less is known about the role that it plays in ASD. Thus, a new research agenda which considers the influence that context, as an intrinsic part of social cognition has on ASD social deficits is timely and clearly needed.
To date, no therapeutic interventions have proven to be widely effective in treating the social symptoms of ASD. These symptoms cause lifelong disabilities for affected individuals and significant burdens on their families, schools, and society. Therefore, a better understanding of ASD is necessary for identifying potential new treatments grounded in experimental evidence.
The general aim of NBUCA is to study the neural and behavioral underpinnings of contextual modulations in ASD during action prediction and comprehension and answer many challenging questions: a) Do children with ASD have a general deficit in integrating context and behavior? b) Does this deficit rely more on the processing of social or non-social contextual information (or both)? c) Are deficits involved in action prediction playing a key role in this disorder? Given these research questions, NBUCA action aims at developing a battery of realistic tasks representing everyday-life situations to be used in different experiments combining brain, behavioral and psychological measures.
