Rachel Miller

In a retrospective study done by Raine (et. al, 2002), young adult males who had a conduct disorder were found to have deficits in spatial but not verbal IQ at a very young age. We have been collecting data in putatively-typically developing young children that demonstrates a relationship between spatial acuity and empathy in young children. A relationship between spatial acuity and social functions, such as empathy, is supported by reports of mirror neurons in the parietal cortex (Iacoboni, 2007). Furthermore, anatomical differences in the mirror neuron system have been found in autistic individuals (Hadjikhani, 2016). Speed of progress through a physical maze and number of wrong turns through the maze were recorded. These data were then correlated with empathy scores taken from an instrument devised for the study where the child was given a short story and then asked how the characters in the story would feel about what happened in their situation. Errors in the small maze were significantly, negatively correlated with empathy scores (r = -0.414, p = 0.032). After controlling for age with a hierarchical regression, the probability of this relationship diminished to p = 0.015 (two-tail). Twenty-seven subjects, ages two through five, were used for this study. Data on additional subjects are being collected in order to obtain statistical significance and to compare the strength of this relationship between male and female children.