Impairment in shifting attention in autistic and cerebellar patients.

Abstract

MRI and autopsy evidence of early maldevelopment of cerebellar vermis and hemispheres in autism raise the question of how cerebellar maldevelopment contributes to the cognitive and social deficits characteristic of autism. Compared with normal controls, autistic patients and patients with acquired cerebellar lesions were similarly impaired in a task requiring rapid and accurate shifts of attention between auditory and visual stimuli. Neurophysiologic and behavioral evidence rules out motor dysfunction as the cause of this deficit. These findings are consistent with the proposal that in autism cerebellar maldevelopment may contribute to an inability to execute rapid attention shifts, which in turn undermines social and cognitive development, and also with the proposal that the human cerebellum is involved in the coordination of rapid attention shifts in a fashion analogous to its role in the coordination of movement.

Motion and Form Coherence Detection in Autistic Spectrum Disorder: Relationship to Motor Control and 2:4 Digit Ratio

“…Recent research has highlighted the influence of attention in early vision such as stereoscopic depth (Rose, Bradshwaw, & Hibbard, 2003) and motion perception (Chaudhuri, 1990). Therefore deficits of attention, which are known to occur in autism (Courchesne et al, 1994;Townsend, Courchesne, & Egaas, 1996) could contribute to increased motion coherence thresholds, however the fact that the children with high motion coherence thresholds did not also have significantly higher form coherence thresholds suggests that whatever the area of deficit it is specific to the motion system. Although this paper does not advance our knowledge of the direct cause of motion impairment in autism, it provides further evidence of a sub-group of children with autism who are impaired at detecting coherent motion in the absence of a concurrent deficit in detecting coherent form, and illustrates that this impairment is related both to fine motor control and to 2D:4D.…”

Right Temporoparietal Gray Matter Predicts Accuracy of Social Perception in the Autism Spectrum

“…Impairments in high-level dynamic attentional processes (Koldewyn et al 2010), and particularly deficits in disengaging or shifting of attention have also been described in autism spectrum disorders (Courchesne et al 1994;Wainwright and Bryson 1996;Goldstein et al 2001). While such aspects of spatial attention are certainly involved in our social motion paradigm, only an extremely specific deficit in spatial attention could explain the present pattern of results.…”

High‐angular resolution diffusion imaging tractography of cerebellar pathways from newborns to young adults

“…Lesions in the cerebellum have resulted in disorders of executive function (Courchesne et al., 1994; Tanaka, Harada, Arai, & Hirata, 2003), visuospatial abilities (Fabbro et al., 2004; Schmahmann & Sherman, 1998), expressive language (Fabbro et al., 2004; Molinari, Leggio, & Silveri, 1997), and affective behavior (Courchesne et al., 1994; Schmahmann, 2000), among others. Cerebellar dysfunction has also been implicated in disorders such as such autism (Courchesne et al., 1994; Fatemi et al., 2012; Penn, 2006), schizophrenia (Lungu et al., 2013; Picard, Amado, Mouchet‐Mages, Olié, & Krebs, 2008; Varambally, Venkatasubramanian, Thirthalli, Janakiramaiah, & Gangadhar, 2006), depression (Beyer & Krishnan, 2002; Leroi et al., 2002), and bipolar disorder (Beyer & Krishnan, 2002; Mills, Delbello, Adler, & Strakowski, 2005). Some of these disorders have been shown to specifically involve the cerebellar peduncle pathways (Hanaei et al., 2013; Hüttlova et al., 2014; Ojemann et al., 2013; Wang, Fan, Xu, & Wang, 2014; Wang et al., 2003, 2003, 2014) and an understanding of the development of these pathways may aid in elucidating our understanding of the development and etiology of these disorders as well as to create related diagnostic technologies.…”