Social stimuli interfere with cognitive control in autism

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized by cognitive control deficits as well as impairments in social interactions. However, the brain mechanisms mediating the interactive effects of these deficits have not been addressed. We employed event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the effects of processing directional information from faces on activity within brain regions mediating cognitive control. High-functioning individuals with autism and age-, gender-, and IQ-matched neurotypical individuals attended to the direction of a centrally-presented arrow or gaze stimulus with similar flanker stimuli oriented in the same ("congruent") or opposite ("incongruent") direction. The incongruent arrow condition was examined to assess functioning of brain regions mediating cognitive control in a context without social-cognitive demands, whereas the incongruent gaze condition assessed functioning of the same brain regions in a social-cognitive context. Consistent with prior studies, the incongruent arrow condition recruited activity in bilateral midfrontal gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral intraparietal sulcus, and the anterior cingulate relative to the congruent arrow condition in neurotypical participants. Notably, there were not diagnostic group differences in patterns of regional fMRI activation in response to the arrow condition. However, while viewing the incongruent gaze stimuli, although neurotypical participants recruited the same brain regions, participants with autism showed marked hypoactivation in these areas. These findings suggest that processing social-cognitive stimuli interferes with functioning of brain regions recruited during cognitive control tasks in autism. Implications for research into cognitive control deficits in autism are discussed.

(How) observed eye-contact modulates gaze following. An fMRI study

“…Hence, in contrast to incongruent gaze cues, which triggered spatial attention shifts, congruent gazes toward the target elicited processes that may be more related to the interpretation of the visual scene (two people looking at the target together). Most importantly, both main contrasts of gaze cues replicate earlier findings (Bristow et al, 2007;Dichter & Belger, 2007;Pelphrey et al, 2003;Schilbach et al, 2010) and-together with our behavioral findings-indicate that the present paradigm successfully induced gaze following.…”

Disentangling Neural Sources of the Motor Interference Effect in High Functioning Autism: An EEG-Study

“…This would have allowed us to exclude the possibility that the observed group difference is due to a non-social effect, that is, the mere observation of (non-biological) movement as compared to when no movement is observed (baseline condition). However, a previous study showed that individuals with ASD show no difference as compared to control individuals in the brain activity in response to non-social arrows in the flanker task (Dichter & Belger, 2007). Moreover, interference tasks that included non-social control conditions did not observe differences for ASD individuals within these 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 conditions (Gowen et al, 2008), which suggest that they generally have no heightened sensitivity for non-social conditions.…”

Autism Spectrum Disorder: Does Neuroimaging Support the DSM-5 Proposal for a Symptom Dyad? A Systematic Review of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Diffusion Tensor Imaging Studies

“…Moreover, some studies support a brain functional overlap between the aforesaid 'social regions' and other neurocognitive processes, These include autobiographical memory processing (Cabeza et al 2004;Markowitsch et al 2000;Spreng et al 2009), which is commonly impaired in patients with ASD Crane and Goddard 2008;Lind and Bowler 2010), as well as motor processing (Allen and Courchesne 2003;Allen et al 2004;Brieber et al 2010;Dinstein et al 2010;Martineau et al 2010;Mizuno et al 2006;Mostofsky et al 2009;Muller et al 2001Muller et al , 2003Muller et al , 2004Villalobos et al 2005) and attention processing (Dichter and Belger 2007). These data suggest a common neuroanatomical substrate for all these ASD deficits (Mostofsky et al 2009).…”