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Introduction: Recent research on sensory-motor skill in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggest that problems with planning sequential actions may explain difficulties with motor execution in this population. The present pilot study investigated upper-limb movement kinematics during a goal-directed manual task requiring sequential action planning in children with and without ASD at 6-7 years.

Patients and method: 3D kinematic recordings of performance with the preferred arm/hand during a sequential peg moving task with varying complexity of goal insertion (five endpoint conditions, open/revealed goal presentation) were carried out in 3 children with ASD (2 girls, mean age 6.3 years) and 3 typically developing children (3 girls, mean age 7 years). End state comfort and trial errors were also assessed.

Results: Preliminary analyses of whole movement spatiotemporal segmentation (movement units, MUs) at trial level revealed significant main effects for group and endpoint condition. Overall, children with ASD consistently performed less proficiently (more MUs) than controls for all conditions across hand/arm and head. Independent of group, all children displayed increased MUs for the more complex endpoints. Children with ASD also showed evidently poorer planning behavior (less end state comfort and increased trial errors) than controls.

Conclusion: Findings suggest difficulties with sequential movement planning in children with ASD in terms of suboptimal movement organization together with reduced end state comfort and inaccurate goal interpretations. In contrast to controls, children with ASD did not seem to have planned the onward action prior to action execution, contributing to the observed less proficient movement kinematics.