Modulation of mu suppression in children with autism spectrum disorders in response to familiar or unfamiliar stimuli: The mirror neuron hypothesis

An Effective Neurofeedback Intervention to Improve Social Interactions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…This pattern of mu suppression was shown only over central electrodes but not over occipital electrodes suggesting a differentiation of mu compared to occipital alpha (Oberman et al 2008). This differentiation is important as the alpha rhythm in occipital regions and the mu rhythm over sensorimotor areas are in the same frequency range (8-12 Hz) and thus recordings over the central electrodes might be affected by this posterior activity.…”

“…High mu power indicates a synchronized, relaxed and yet focused state and is assumed to be a prerequisite for mu suppression (Nowlis and Kamiya 1970;Pineda 2005), which is suggestive of more activation of the MNS (Oberman et al 2008). Additionally, in previous studies, training mu rhythm enhancement usually involved feedback that was unrelated to the significance of the mu rhythm or the anticipated behavioral changes (e.g., using the speed of a car as feedback for training the mu rhythm to activate the MNS and thus improve imitation behavior) Coben et al 2010;Thompson et al 2010).…”

The functional role of the parieto-frontal mirror circuit: interpretations and misinterpretations

“…It provides a basic mechanism that unifies action production and action observation, allowing the understanding of the actions of others from the inside. Box 3 | The mirror mechanism and autism Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is a syndrome characterized by impairment in social skills, communicative abilities, emotional responses and motor behaviour [109][110][111][112][113] . Over the past few years, a number of electrophysiological and brain imaging experiments 62,[114][115][116][117] showed that individuals with ASD have an impairment of the mirror mechanism, suggesting that the social 'aloneness' that is typical of an individual with ASD might result from this deficit [118][119][120] .…”

Neurofeedback training produces normalization in behavioural and electrophysiological measures of high-functioning autism

“…Indeed, several studies have demonstrated that individuals with ASD exhibit abnormal mu rhythm suppression, suggesting that their mirroring system does not engage normally when observing someone else's movements [7,23]. As argued above, deficits in MNS activity provide a basis for problems in higher order social cognition, such as empathy, theory of mind, imitation and language.…”

“…A particularly relevant functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study by Dapretto et al [8] demonstrated decreased activation in the IFG (pars opercularis) in individuals on the autism spectrum, and activity in this region was found to be inversely related to symptom severity in the social domain. Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies have also shown that putative electro-biomarkers of MNS activity exhibit abnormalities in ASD compared with typically developing (TD) children [7,20,23,24]. Nonetheless, despite the excitement generated by these observations, few if any investigations have focused on operationalizing such insights towards practical solutions to the early diagnosis, amelioration or possible repair of MNS deficits.…”