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Introduction: Difficulties with action planning and visuomotor integration may contribute to atypical motorfunctioning in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), although detailed studies of sensorimotorintegration in action planning are sparse. This ongoing study investigates visuomotor integration in actionplanning in 7-year-old children with and without ASD.

Patients and methods: A sub-sample of 6 children with ASD and 6 typically developing (TD) controls wereincluded. Recordings of gaze synchronized with 3D kinematic registration were made during performance of amanual sequential peg rotation task with variations in goal insertion complexity. Group differences and relations between movement duration and number of gaze shifts over the sequential movement phases(latency, reach-to-grasp, grasp, and transport-to-fit) were explored.

Results: No significant group differences were found for either movement duration or number of gaze shifts.When controlling for the between-participants variance, total number of gaze shifts and number of gaze shiftsin reach-to-grasp were related to movement duration in the initial phases of the movement in the TD-group but not in the ASD-group.

Conclusion: The results indicate that, whilst performance measures were similar between groups, the overallpattern of visuomotor integration was related to feed-forward movement processes in the sequentialmovement in the TD-group but not in the ASD-group. This finding adds support to previous suggestions thatvisuomotor integration underpinning action planning may operate differently in ASD. Synchronizedexamination of gaze and detailed movement registration appears as a promising methodology for detailed investigation of visuomotor integration in action planning.