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Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

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Re: Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

#21

Post by ActorNightly »

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...

Roughly speaking, in our brains have to reconcile the internal models of the world with predictions and what we receive through stimuli. Neurotypical people can do this without issues, disregarding either one. Autistic people basically are wired to pay way more attention to external stimuli no matter how small it is.

This sort of explanation makes the most sense, and can contextualize this as well. The gait trait is basically an optimization that comes from a higher sensory sensitivity and low value of "how should I be walking".

Re: Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

#24

Post by ModernMech »

blamestross wrote: post #15

Cool time to show off my gait/foot scan https://my.volumental.com/en/fleet_feet_rics/5128511c-cd88-4... Shoes are evil. Barefoot all the things. I think I might be a bit autistic...

The most autistic people I know wear sandals all year round. People laugh about sandals and socks but you're right -- shoes are evil! I'll take looking like a dork over having sore feet all the time.

Re: Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

#25

Post by tibbar »

I, too, walk funny. I distinctly remember an authority figure trying to teach me how to walk properly as an adolescent, and other people in my life occasionally comment on it. I guess I walk by swinging my legs from the top and placing my entire foot down evenly on the ground, which leads to very broad and shallow footprints on the beach. I am naturally a very slow walker and a bit unsteady.

Re: Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

#26

Post by elric »

Human locomation is surprisingly complex. Maybe not that surprising, what with roughly 20 bones and 30 muscles in a single foot. That doesn't even include the joints needed for motion and the muscles required to move your legs or swing your arms while you walk.

Allegedly some law enforcement uses gait analysis to identify and follow individual people on CCTV recordings. Gait has diagnostic value in some neurological conditions (like multiple sclerosis). Doesn't seem far fetched that a complex disorder like autism would also affect gait.

Re: Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

#27

Post by kulahan »

Telemakhos wrote: post #19
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #3

- toe-walking, walking on the balls of the feet - in-toeing, walking with one or both feet turned inwards - out-toeing, walking with one or both feet turned out. I thought that toe walking was called out two decades ago when I was in university - I remember it being mentioned in a psych class. Otherwise, that kind of includes everyone who doesn't walk with feet straight, doesn't it?

People should be careful with basing psychological stereotypes on gait, as there's already an extensive legacy framework of stereotypes based on gait—are these new stereotypes meaningfully different medical observations grounded in facts, or are they just more stereotypes? Literature on Native Americans, for example, often claims that they walk on the balls of the feet in distinction to "the Anglo," who walks on his…

Your comment doesn’t really support its own premise well - you just say that we used to stereotype people and point out what some of those stereotypes were, but not why they’re radically incorrect. You sorta just pointed out that they exist.

I’m not of one opinion or the other, I just don’t see why it’s self evident that certain groups of people wouldn’t walk a certain way.

Re: Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

#28

Post by hx8 »

generalizations wrote: post #12
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #3

- toe-walking, walking on the balls of the feet - in-toeing, walking with one or both feet turned inwards - out-toeing, walking with one or both feet turned out. I thought that toe walking was called out two decades ago when I was in university - I remember it being mentioned in a psych class. Otherwise, that kind of includes everyone who doesn't walk with feet straight, doesn't it?

Basically a measure of whether or not you make an effort to emulate your peers. If you naturally walk weird and don't care about fitting in, then....you're probably on the spectrum.

That's one potential explanation for gait differences. It's also possible that muscle development plays a role, or motor control, or sensory feedback, or a confluence of factors.

I'd be particularly interested in seeing if these gait differences are limited to childhood, or if they persist into adulthood. It might simply be delaying a developmental step.

Re: Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

#29

Post by ltbarcly3 »

Virtually everything about you is encoded in virtually everything you do. With enough intelligence and enough data, it's probably possible to determine with a high degree of accuracy what kind of mint you prefer (spearmint, peppermint, that other one) based on hearing you talk for 30s.

In a world with AI systems that can be trained in an unsupervised way against basically all the data we can collect, the amount of information that can be accurately predicted about you is probably proportional to the number of bits of observational data about you available to to the AI, and I would suspect there is a roughly logistic relationship between bits available and the % of information it can reliably guess.

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