Dipartimento di Psicologia

Descrizione del progetto

The ambition of Find.Aut is to develop a quantitative methodology to determine whether and to what extent the motor information can be used to differentiate children with autism from those with typical development and those with motor skills disorder. To do so, several classes of movements will be recorded and from them we will compute kinematic features, such as velocity, acceleration, jerk, movement duration and curvature.

Indeed, one of the main advantages in the study of the kinematics is the possibility to identify regularities in almost any movement. Given an arbitrary path with an arbitrary curvature, it is for example possible to predict which velocity profile will emerge; also, given an arbitrary distance between the hand and the target object, it can be foreseen that velocity will increase as the linear extension of the movement increases.

In the Start Up phase of the project, Find.Aut aims to explore the actual stability of these kinematic regularities in typically developing people. This preliminary research stage will represent a critical step towards the determination of experimental protocols that will be implemented in a second phase on people with autism spectrum disorder.