In an interesting 2008 study, Vivanti and Rogers ruled out both motor impairment and following the task as reasons why children with autism have difficulty in an imitation task.  One finding that could be important is that the study participants with autism spent less time looking at the face.  This leads to the interesting idea that learning to better read emotions, an important component of social interactions,  might also improve imitation, which is another key component of social interactions:

“It could be that if people with autism could be better at reading emotion they might naturally start to imitate their models the way like other people do.”
—Sally Rogers, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences

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