Editorial for research topic “Autism: the movement perspective”

This Research Topic is an introduction to an innovative approach to studying and supporting individuals with autism, (ASD).Until now, ASD has been characterized as a disruption in social interactions.Typically, the diagnosis is based on subjective observational inventories describing "behaviors."Treatment also involves the description of behaviors by pencil and paper instruments.Such hand-made scales continue to be the gold standard to track "evidence based" progress and lead to controversies without a single reliable, physical measurement.The lack of real measurement leads to unreliable and self-fulfilling predictions and outcomes.Such methods have done little to alter lifetime outcomes for most individuals with autism.How can we improve the standards of research, diagnosis, and the assessments of treatment effectiveness in autism?How can we link movements to cognitive abilities?They seem so far apart at present.And, how can we begin to understand the individual with ASD as a person who is, like all humans, a social being who can be an active participant in all aspects of his or her life and learning.This Research Topic explores what we can do beyond stating the obvious.This collection of papers proposes an out-of-the-box approach to several problems in the autism spectrum to make the case that movement can be our best ally in autism, at all fronts.When behavior is tracked observationally or simply counted with an exclusively psychological (guessing/theorizing) perspective, the continuous stream of movement and variable degrees of intent that are inherently present in natural behaviors are lost.Some movements making up such behaviors have an unambiguous goal and are readily caught by the conscious human eye.However, a large majority of the actions of living creatures goes by largely beneath awareness.These movements occur much too quickly, within frequencies and time scales that escape the conscious eye.Observers cannot register those motions when they are busy trying to keep track of the deliberate ones that we instruct people in the spectrum to perform when they visit our labs or clinics or are otherwise under our gaze.These motions are not available to observers trying to keep track of deliberate motions.However, instrumentation can capture with high precision the movements that our eyes miss.New technology can track levels of variability throughout the body, from facial microexpressions to rapid and frequent eye motions that scan the environment as we interact with it, to fine and gross motions of our limbs and trunk, including those mysterious reflexes that seem to go awry at an early age in autism (first published by the Teitelbaum's in 1984.)Movement is measurable.Its quantification can bring the science of autism to a higher, more rigorous standard that is lacking today.It can also facilitate scientific exchange and allow us to replicate results worldwide.This will turn biometrics and biomarkers of physiological motions into an objectively defined common language for scientific communication.We would at last be able to follow the true scientific method,