In another experiment, the children with autism showed no impairment in gesture recognition, and in fact performed better than did the matched controls. The authors concluded that their data are not compatible with the hypothesis of an action representation deficit or mirror neuron deficit in children with autism spectrum disorder.
“The broken-mirror-in-autism idea is a very appealing hypothesis which has received a lot of press in the last few years, despite the fact that there [is a scarcity of] hard data to support it,” Dr. Hamilton said in an interview.
“Also, none of the studies of imitation in autism—which claim to support the mirror neuron idea—have really shown that the problem is in the mirror neurons themselves, rather than some other social process which controls the mirror neurons,” she added.
Yellow areas highlight clusters of increased gray matter in the right and left parietal cortex as seen on DTI. Radiological Society of North America