ADOS: The Physiology Approach to Assess Social Skills and Communication in Autism Spectrum Disorder

This section of the book has provided an outline of research aimed at exploring the development and refinement of social skills, social cognition, and communication—a core area of inquiry of autism research. Yet, as noted, an individual’s background and training will guide research—in terms of both the questions posed and the approaches adopted for analyses, the inferences made, and the interpretation of data. This chapter aims to provide a concrete working example
of social dynamics in autism spectrum disorder as decomposed and considered from the perspective of a physiologist and computational neuroscientist. In particular, this chapter illustrates the role of dyadic exchange within the framework of closed feedback loops, which consider reentrant information from sensations of self-generated motion—an element currently missing from the working conceptualization of social exchange. Further, the exchange of volitional and
spontaneously co-occurring social motions across a dyad will be objectively quantified, and examined as evolving levels of entrainment. Through this new multidisciplinary movement sensing perspective, we demonstrate the potential utility of such metrics to inform and reshape a diagnostic tool—the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (Lord et al. 2000, 2012), from a monologue to a social dyad.