Autism and motor acts: experimental analysison mylohyoid muscle emg recordingsduring grasping-to-eat action - biomed 2010

Biomed Sci Instrum. 2010:46:178-83.

Abstract

Most neuroscience studies do not pay enough attention to bio-mechanical related problems, such as the kinematic aspects of movements, that pose important boundary conditions, but are in general not sufficiently taken into consideration. In this work, using an experimental protocol based on measurements of mylohyoid (MH) muscle activity during grasping-to-eat actions, we debate the existence of impairments of action chains in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We re-examine the results of an electromyographic (EMG) experiment on MH muscle presented in a previous study; and we compare them to the results of a new, similar experiment in order to study the electromyographic activity of MH in typically developing (TD) children and in children with ASD executing grasping-to-eat actions. Our results are remarkably different from the original work and seem to indicate that there is no clear experimental evidence of different action organization in children with ASD.