An Objective System for Quantifying the Effect of Cognitive Load on Movement in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

For someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder, performance on tasks that require coordinated motor and cognitive activities, such as walking while talking (or texting) on our phones, can take substantially more effort to accomplish. While it is more common to isolate and examine motor and cognitive skill in separate experiments, we propose a dual task experiment to allow us to examine performance in people with autism more realistically. We designed a system composed of three task types and accompanying hardware to simultaneously quantify balance, fine motor skill, and cognitive ability. We hypothesized that the additional demands of the balance and speeded finger-tapping tasks would degrade motor performance in the simultaneous conditions, but not impact cognitive (N-Back task) performance. Movement data were evaluated by comparing the change of each group across 3 levels of cognitive load (0-, 1-, and 2-back). We tested the task on a small sample of young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n=4) and matched controls (n=4). We observed a trend largely consistent with our hypotheses. The system’s temporal precision and modular design also allow for the incorporation of other sensors as needed, like EEG or heart rate variability. We propose that a version of this system be tested as a putative outcome measure for interventions involving attention, cognitive load or certain types of motor skill training.