Abstract: As one of the social stimulus, biological motion contains rich social cues, which enables individuals to understand body language and emotions expressed by others. There is a close relationship between the perception of biological motion and the abilities of imitation and joint attention, which are the important bases of later social and language development, so the perception of biological motion has a direct impact on individuals' social cognition and social interaction. Typical developing (TD) individuals show a bias of attention to biological motion from birth, and with the development, the mechanism of complex information processing of biological motion tends to mature. There are three levels of processing biological motion: detection, perception and interpretation. The first level refers to the identification of biological motion without an explicit recognition or categorization of the different types of biological motion. The second level perception refers to explicitly recognizing the different types of biological motion. The third level, interpretation of biological motion, implicates that an observer can retrieve high level social information, such as others' intention, emotional states or actions, conveyed in biological motion stimulus. Previous studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were impaired in the processing of high level biological motion information (perception and interpretation) compared with TD individuals, while there is a debate about whether the processing of low level biological motion information (detection) is impaired. Some behavioral studies demonstrated that individuals with ASD had impaired ability to detect biological motion, while other neural studies found that individuals with ASD exhibited normal behaviors but abnormal neural responses. The differences mentioned above are mainly caused by different stimuli, different tasks and different indices across studies. Neurological studies have found that the underlying mechanism of the impairment remains a debate among three theoretical hypotheses: abnormal social function based on the dysfunction of posterior superior temporal sulcus, abnormal visual motion perception based on the dysfunction of dorsal visual stream, and weak central coherent based on abnormal brain functional connection. The first hypothesis suggests that individuals with ASD exhibit reduced activation in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), which leads to the impairment in the detection of social information such as biological motion. The second hypothesis shows that impaired dorsal visual stream in individuals with ASD results in abnormal visual motion perception, which leads to the impairment of biological motion detection. Furthermore, the third hypothesis indicates that the abnormality of brain functional connection in individuals with ASD leads to weak central coherent, which results in the impairment of biological motion detection. Based on the above theoretical hypotheses, this paper summarized the researches on biological motion detection in ASD from three aspects of research paradigms, behavior performance and underlying mechanism, to clarify the characteristics and underlying mechanism of biological motion detection impairments in individuals with ASD, so as to provide a certain direction for follow-up researches.

Key words: autism spectrum disorders, biological motion detection, posterior superior temporal sulcus, dorsal visual stream

摘要： 关于孤独症谱系障碍(autism spectrum disorder, ASD)个体探测生物运动(biological motion)的能力是否受损，已有行为研究尚存分歧。导致分歧的原因可能源于实验刺激、实验任务和测量指标存在差异。然而，神经研究却一致证实其潜在的神经机制存在异常。领域特殊性观点认为该障碍可能是基于后侧颞上沟功能异常也可能是基于镜像神经元功能异常，而领域一般性观点认为该障碍可能是基于背侧视觉流功能异常的视运动知觉障碍也可能基于脑功能联结异常的弱中央统合障碍。据此，本文将从研究范式、行为表现及潜在机制三个方面梳理相关研究，以期为后续研究提供新方向。

关键词: 孤独症谱系障碍, 生物运动探测, 后侧颞上沟, 背侧视觉流