Functional neuroimaging of social and nonsocial cognitive control in autism.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Sabatino A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3992711 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Dec
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Functional neuroimaging of social and nonsocial cognitive control in autism.
Sabatino Antoinette A Rittenberg Alison A Sasson Noah J NJ Turner-Brown Lauren L Bodfish James W JW Dichter Gabriel S GS
Journal of autism and developmental disorders 20131201 12
This study investigated cognitive control of social and nonsocial information in autism using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and a neurotypical control group completed an oddball target detection task where target stimuli were either faces or nonsocial objects previously shown to be related to circumscribed interests in autism. The ASD group demonstrated relatively increased activation to social targets in right insular cortex and in left ...[more]
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Project description:ImportanceMany studies have investigated impairments in cognitive domains in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Yet, to date, a comprehensive overview on the patterns of cognitive functioning is lacking.ObjectiveTo provide an overview of nonsocial and social cognitive functioning in various domains in adults with ASD, allowing for comparison of the severity of deficits between different domains.Data sourcesA literature search performed in an academic medical setting was conducted using PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, and Medline databases with the combination of the following free-text and Medical Subject Headings where applicable: [cogniti* OR neurocogniti* OR neuropsycholog* OR executive function* OR IQ OR intelligence quotient OR social cognition OR emotion perception OR affect perception OR emotion recognition OR attribution OR ToM OR mentalising OR mentalizing OR prosody OR social knowledge OR mind reading OR social cue OR social judgment] AND [autis* OR ASD OR Asperger OR Asperger's OR PDD OR pervasive developmental disorder]. The search was further limited to studies published between 1980 (first inclusion of autism diagnosis in the DSM-III) and July 2018.Study selectionStudies included were published as a primary peer-reviewed research article in English, included individuals with ASD 16 years or older, and assessed at least 1 domain of neurocognitive functioning or social cognition using standard measures.Data extraction and synthesisOf 9892 articles identified and screened, 75 met the inclusion criteria for the systematic review and meta-analysis.Main outcomes and measuresHedges g effect sizes were computed, and random-effects models were used for all analyses. Moderators of between-study variability in effect sizes were assessed using meta-regressions.ResultsThe systematic review and meta-analysis included 75 studies, with a combined sample of 3361 individuals with ASD (mean [SD] age, 32.0 [9.3] years; 75.9% male) and 5344 neurotypical adults (mean [SD] age, 32.3 [9.1] years; 70.1% male). Adults with ASD showed large impairments in theory of mind (g = -1.09; 95% CI, -1.25 to -0.92; number of studies = 39) and emotion perception and processing (g = -0.80; 95% CI, -1.04 to -0.55; n = 18), followed by medium impairments in processing speed (g = -0.61; 95% CI, -0.83 to -0.38; n = 21) and verbal learning and memory (g = -0.55; 95% CI, -0.86 to -0.25; n = 12). The least altered cognitive domains were attention and vigilance (g = -0.30; 95% CI, -0.81 to 0.21; n = 5) and working memory (g = -0.23; 95% CI, -0.47 to 0.01; n = 19). Meta-regressions confirmed robustness of the results.Conclusions and relevanceResults of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that adults with ASD show impairments in social cognitive domains and in specific nonsocial cognitive domains. These findings contribute to the understanding of the patterns of cognitive functioning in adults with ASD and may assist in the identification of targets for cognitive interventions.
| S-EPMC6439743 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Functional neuroimaging studies of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have examined social and nonsocial paradigms, although rarely in the same study. Here, we provide an objective, unbiased survey of functional brain abnormalities in ASD, related to both social and nonsocial processing.We conducted two separate voxel-wise activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses of 39 functional neuroimaging studies consisting of 24 studies examining social processes (e.g., theory of mind, face perception) and 15 studies examining nonsocial processes (e.g., attention control, working memory). Voxel-wise significance threshold was p<.05, corrected by false discovery rate.Compared with neurotypical control (NC) subjects, ASD showed greater likelihood of hypoactivation in two medial wall regions: perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in social tasks only and dorsal ACC in nonsocial studies. Further, right anterior insula, recently linked to social cognition, was more likely to be hypoactivated in ASD in the analyses of social studies. In nonsocial studies, group comparisons showed greater likelihood of activation for the ASD group in the rostral ACC region that is typically suppressed during attentionally demanding tasks.Despite substantial heterogeneity of tasks, the rapidly increasing functional imaging literature showed ASD-related patterns of hypofunction and aberrant activation that depended on the specific cognitive domain, i.e., social versus nonsocial. These results provide a basis for targeted extensions of these findings with younger subjects and a range of paradigms, including analyses of default mode network regulation in ASD.
| S-EPMC2993772 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Transcriptomics of social and nonsocial spiders
| PRJNA685164 | ENA
Project description:Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by impaired predictive abilities; however, the neural mechanisms subsuming reward prediction errors in ASD are poorly understood. In the current study, we investigated neural responses during social and nonsocial reward prediction errors in 22 adolescents with ASD (ages 12-17) and 20 typically developing control adolescents (ages 12-18). Participants performed a reward prediction error task using both social (i.e., faces) and nonsocial (i.e., objects) rewards during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Reward prediction errors were defined in two ways: (a) the signed prediction error, the difference between the experienced and expected reward; and (b) the thresholded unsigned prediction error, the difference between expected and unexpected outcomes regardless of magnitude. During social reward prediction errors, the ASD group demonstrated the following differences relative to the TD group: (a) signed prediction error: decreased activation in the right precentral gyrus and increased activation in the right frontal pole; and (b) thresholded unsigned prediction error: increased activation in the right anterior cingulate gyrus and bilateral precentral gyrus. Groups did not differ in brain activation during nonsocial reward prediction errors. Within the ASD group, exploratory analyses revealed that reaction times and social-communication impairments were related to precentral gyrus activation during social prediction errors. These findings elucidate the neural mechanisms of social reward prediction errors in ASD and suggest that ASD is characterized by greater neural atypicalities during social, relative to nonsocial, reward prediction errors in ASD. Autism Res 2020, 13: 715-728. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: We used brain imaging to evaluate differences in brain activation in adolescents with autism while they performed tasks that involved learning about social and nonsocial information. We found no differences in brain responses during the nonsocial condition, but differences during the social condition of the learning task. This study provides evidence that autism may involve different patterns of brain activation when learning about social information.
| S-EPMC8112190 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Numerous studies have identified abnormal gaze in individuals with autism. However, only some findings have been replicated, the magnitude of effects is unclear, and the pattern of gaze differences across stimuli remains poorly understood. To address these gaps, a comprehensive meta-analysis of autism eye-tracking studies was conducted.PubMed and a manual search of 1,132 publications were used to identify studies comparing looking behavior to social and/or nonsocial stimuli between individuals with autism and controls. Sample characteristics, eye-tracking methods, stimulus features, and regions of interest (ROIs) were coded for each comparison within each study. Multivariate mixed-effects meta-regression analyses examined the impact of study methodology, stimulus features, and ROI on effect sizes derived from comparisons using gaze-fixation metrics.The search yielded 122 independent studies with 1,155 comparisons. Estimated effect sizes tended to be small to medium but varied substantially across stimuli and ROIs. Overall, nonsocial ROIs yielded larger effect sizes than social ROIs; however, eye and whole-face regions from stimuli with human interaction produced the largest effects (Hedges g = 0.47 and 0.50, respectively). Studies with weaker study designs or reporting yielded larger effects, but key effects remained significant and medium in size, even for high-rigor designs.Individuals with autism show a reliable pattern of gaze abnormalities that suggests a basic problem with selecting socially relevant versus irrelevant information for attention and that persists across ages and worsens during perception of human interactions. Aggregation of gaze abnormalities across stimuli and ROIs could yield clinically useful risk assessment and quantitative, objective outcome measurements.
| S-EPMC5578719 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Atypical social impairments (i.e., impaired social cognition and social communication) are vital manifestations of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) patients, and the incidence rate of ASD is significantly higher in males than in females. Characterizing the atypical brain patterns underlying social deficits of ASD is significant for understanding the pathogenesis. However, there are no robust imaging biomarkers that are specific to ASD, which may be due to neurobiological complexity and limitations of single-modality research. To describe the multimodal brain patterns related to social deficits in ASD, we highlighted the potential functional role of white matter (WM) and incorporated WM functional activity and gray matter structure into multimodal fusion. Gray matter volume (GMV) and fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations of WM (WM-fALFF) were combined by fusion analysis model adopting the social behavior. Our results revealed multimodal spatial patterns associated with Social Responsiveness Scale multiple scores in ASD. Specifically, GMV exhibited a consistent brain pattern, in which salience network and limbic system were commonly identified associated with all multiple social impairments. More divergent brain patterns in WM-fALFF were explored, suggesting that WM functional activity is more sensitive to ASD's complex social impairments. Moreover, brain regions related to social impairment may be potentially interconnected across modalities. Cross-site validation established the repeatability of our results. Our research findings contribute to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying social disorders in ASD and affirm the feasibility of identifying biomarkers from functional activity in WM.
| S-EPMC11372822 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How do people acquire knowledge about which individuals belong to different cliques or communities? And to what extent does this learning process differ from the process of learning higher-order information about complex associations between nonsocial bits of information? Here, the authors use a paradigm in which the order of stimulus presentation forms temporal associations between the stimuli, collectively constituting a complex network. They examined individual differences in the ability to learn community structure of networks composed of social versus nonsocial stimuli. Although participants were able to learn community structure of both social and nonsocial networks, their performance in social network learning was uncorrelated with their performance in nonsocial network learning. In addition, social traits, including social orientation and perspective-taking, uniquely predicted the learning of social community structure but not the learning of nonsocial community structure. Taken together, the results suggest that the process of learning higher-order community structure in social networks is partially distinct from the process of learning higher-order community structure in nonsocial networks. The study design provides a promising approach to identify neurophysiological drivers of social network versus nonsocial network learning, extending knowledge about the impact of individual differences on these learning processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
| S-EPMC6339609 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Restrictive and repetitive behavior in autism may be related to deficits in cognitive control. Here, we aimed to assess functional connectivity during a cognitive control task and compare brain network activity and connectivity in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing children using a multivariate data-driven approach. 19 high-functioning boys with ASD and 19 age-matched typically developing boys were included in this study. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed at 3T during the performance of a cognitive control task (go/no-go paradigm). Functional networks were identified using independent component analysis. Network activity and connectivity was compared between groups and correlated with clinical measures of rigid behavior using multivariate analysis of covariance. We found no differences between the groups in task performance or in network activity. Power analysis indicated that, if this were a real difference, it would require nearly 800 subjects to show group differences in network activity using this paradigm. Neither were there correlations between network activity and rigid behavior. Our data do not provide support for the presence of deficits in cognitive control in children with ASD, or the functional networks supporting this ability.
| S-EPMC4141973 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The social intelligence hypothesis suggests that living in large social networks was the primary selective pressure for the evolution of complex cognition in primates. This hypothesis is supported by comparative studies demonstrating a positive relationship between social group size and relative brain size across primates. However, the relationship between brain size and cognition remains equivocal. Moreover, there have been no experimental studies directly testing the association between group size and cognition across primates. We tested the social intelligence hypothesis by comparing 6 primate species (total N?=?96) characterized by different group sizes on two cognitive tasks. Here, we show that a species' typical social group size predicts performance on cognitive measures of social cognition, but not a nonsocial measure of inhibitory control. We also show that a species' mean brain size (in absolute or relative terms) does not predict performance on either task in these species. These data provide evidence for a relationship between group size and social cognition in primates, and reveal the potential for cognitive evolution without concomitant changes in brain size. Furthermore our results underscore the need for more empirical studies of animal cognition, which have the power to reveal species differences in cognition not detectable by proxy variables, such as brain size.
| S-EPMC3694165 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundHuman beings find social stimuli rewarding, which is thought to facilitate efficient social functioning. Although reward processing has been extensively studied in schizophrenia, a few studies have examined neural processes specifically involved in social reward processing. This study examined neural sensitivity to social and nonsocial rewards in schizophrenia.MethodsTwenty-seven patients with schizophrenia and 25 community controls completed a One-Armed Bandit Task, an implicit reinforcement learning task, in the scanner. There were 2 conditions with an identical trial structure, one with social rewards and the other with nonsocial rewards. The data were analyzed using a region of interest (ROI) approach, focusing on the ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex.ResultsAcross all 3 ROIs, patients showed reduced activation for social rewards compared to controls. However, the 2 groups showed comparable levels of activation for nonsocial rewards. Within the patient group, levels of neural activation in these ROIs during the social reward condition were associated with better performance.ConclusionsThis study found reduced neural sensitivity in patients with schizophrenia in key reward-processing regions for social but not for nonsocial rewards. These findings suggest a relatively specific social reward-processing deficit in schizophrenia during an implicit reinforcement learning task.
| S-EPMC6483569 | biostudies-literature