Children with autism spectrum disorder perform comparably to their peers in a parent–child cooperation task

This study investigates whether and how parent’s cooperation affects child’s cooperation, and whether that differs between children with/without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The experiment involved a cooperative key-pressing task completed first by parent–parent dyads and then by parent–child dyads, meanwhile brain activity in the right frontal–parietal cortex of dyad partners was measured synchronously. The results showed the following: ASD children exhibited performance comparable to those of their peers, as was the level of brain synchronization with their parents, which was mainly due to parents with ASD children tending to adjust their own response patterns to match those of their children. These findings suggest that parents can somewhat actively mitigate the lower interpersonal synchronization ability of ASD children, in behavioral or/and neural level.