Recently, findings on a wide range of auditory abnormalities among individuals with autism have been reported. To date, functional distinctions among these varied findings are poorly established. Such distinctions should be of interest to clinicians and researchers alike given their potential therapeutic and experimental applications. This review suggests three general trends among these findings as a starting point for future analyses. First, studies of auditory perception of linguistic and social auditory stimuli among individuals with autism generally have found impaired perception versus normal controls. Such findings may correlate with impaired language and communication skills and social isolation observed among individuals with autism. Second, studies of auditory perception of pitch and music among individuals with autism generally have found enhanced perception versus normal controls. These findings may correlate with the restrictive and highly focused behaviors observed among individuals with autism. Third, findings on the auditory perception of non-linguistic, non-musical stimuli among autism patients resist any generalized conclusions. Ultimately, as some researchers have already suggested, the distinction between impaired global processing and enhanced local processing may prove useful in making sense of apparently discordant findings on auditory abnormalities among individuals with autism.

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Based on accumulating evidence, vascular factors contribute to cognitive decline and dementia. Mitochondrial dysfunction is the core pathophysiological mechanism. Mitochondria-associated endoplasmic reticulum membranes (MAMs) are subcellular structures that physically and biologically connect mitochondria with the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and regulate multiple functions ranging from calcium transfer to mitochondrial dynamics and bioenergetics. MAMs dysfunction has been speculated to be a key factor contributing to the pathogenesis of cognitive disorders and a new therapeutic target. However, the alteration of MAMs in vascular cognitive impairment remains to be revealed. Capsaicin, a specific agonist known to activated the transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1 (TRPV1), is involved in hippocampal synaptic plasticity and memory, but the detailed mechanism is still unclear. In this study, chronic cerebral hypoperfusion (CCH) model rats were created by bilateral common carotid artery occlusion (BCCAO), which is a widely used model to study vascular dementia. We observed that CCH rats showed obvious cognitive deficits, and ER-mitochondria contacts were loosener with lower expression of mitofusin2 (MFN2), a key protein connecting MAMs, in the hippocampal CA1 region, compared to the sham group. After capsaicin treatment for 12 weeks, we found that cognitive deficits induced by CCH were significantly alleviated and loosened ER-mitochondrial interactions were obviously improved. In conclusion, the findings of this study highlight that MAMs may contribute to the pathogenesis of cognitive impairment induced by CCH, and our new evidence that capsaicin improves cognitive function highlights a novel opportunity for drug discovery.

Although the unity and diversity model of executive functions (EFs) has been replicated, there are some studies questioning the validity of the EFs construct. This debate can be partially resolved by directly combining the brain activity pattern in different executive control processes. Previous univariate activation studies have suggested that the neural substrates of different EFs (e.g., updating, inhibiting, and shifting) involve common and distinct brain regions. However, the underlying multivariate neural representation of EFs in terms of unity and diversity is still elusive. Here, we employed the n-back task, stop signal task, and category switching task to investigate the characteristic of the neural representation in the three EF domains. At the global level, multivoxel pattern analysis revealed that a three-way classifier built with global activation pattern successfully distinguished the three EF tasks. At the local level, although most overlapping activations exhibit lower neural representational similarity, the inferior frontal junction showed similar neural representation across the three EFs, which was further confirmed by searchlight analysis that additionally revealed other similar representational regions were located in the presupplementary motor area extend to dorsal midcingulate cortex. In addition, using machine learningbased predictive framework, the resting-state functional networks built with the representational regions of EFs predicted intellectual abilities to some extent in a large independent sample. These findings suggest that different EFs are characterized by dissociable global neural representation but also share similar local neural representation, which contributes to understanding the neural correlates of the unity and diversity of EFs from an integrated framework.