Abstract
Functional connectivity, quantified by phase synchrony, between brain regions is known to be aberrant in patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we evaluated the long-range temporal correlations of time-varying phase synchrony (TV-PS) of electrocortical oscillations in patients with ASD as well as typically developing people using detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) after validating the scale-invariance of the TV-PS time series. By comparing the DFA exponents between the two groups, we found that those of the TV-PS time series of high-gamma oscillations were significantly attenuated in patients with ASD. Furthermore, the regions involved in aberrant TV-PS time series were mainly within the social ability and cognition-related cortical networks. These results support the notion that abnormal social functions observed in patients with ASD may be caused by the highly volatile phase synchrony states of electrocortical oscillations.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a group of neurodevelopmental disorders with sociocommunicative impairments, restricted and repetitive behaviors and interests as core diagnostic features [1]
Exploring the datasets in behavioral science and neuroscience, previous researchers found that scale invariance/Long-range temporal correlation (LRTC) are omnipresent in nature, which supports the theory that cortical activities may sit in a dynamic state close to the criticality [28]
We investigated the scale-invariant characters of resting-state EEG signals in autism, and found that the LRTCs of region-to-region, time-varying, phase synchrony time series within the high-gamma band were reduced in the autistic brain
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a group of neurodevelopmental disorders with sociocommunicative impairments, restricted and repetitive behaviors and interests as core diagnostic features [1]. Scientists found that the symptomatology of this disease was not caused by specific cortical regions, but was associated with the hyper- or hypo-connectivity between cortical regions [2, 3]. In most published ASD studies, researchers investigated the undirected or directed functional connectivity (FC) between brain regions using measures such as correlation, phase synchrony, and Granger causality, and assumed that these measures were stationary over time [4]. Recent studies have confirmed that FC metrics exhibit variation over time, even during the task-free resting state [5]. Temporal variation in FC metrics can be modulated by various factors, such as brain disorders [6]. The majority of previous studies concentrated on the altered magnitude of functional connectivity between brain regions; few studies have investigated the temporal structure of the time-varying connectivity in the autistic brain
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