Abstract
The social and communicative difficulties that characterize autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are considered the most striking feature of the disorder. Research has reported that individuals with ASD show abnormalities in the brain regions associated with the processing of social information. Importantly, a recent study using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) found the first evidence of atypicalities in the neural processing of social information in 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants at high familial risk of ASD. These findings provide an important step in the search for early markers of ASD and highlight the potential for neuroimaging techniques to detect atypical patterns of neural activity prior to the manifestation of most behavioural symptoms. This study aimed to extend the findings of reduced neural sensitivity to social stimuli in an independent cohort. Twenty‐nine 5‐month‐old infants (13 low‐risk infants, 16 high‐risk infants) were presented with social and non‐social visual stimuli, similar to the previous experiment. Importantly, a non‐social dynamic motion control condition was introduced allowing the comparison between social dynamic and non‐social, static, as well as dynamic stimuli. We found that while low‐risk infants showed activation to social stimuli in the right posterior temporal cortex, this activation was reduced in infants at high risk of ASD. Although the current sample size was relatively small, our results replicate and extend previous work and provide evidence for a social processing difference in infants at risk of autism. Future research will determine whether these differences relate to an eventual ASD diagnosis or may rather reflect the broader autism phenotype.
Highlights
The social and communication difficulties that characterize autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are considered the most striking feature of the disorder
The results reported as significant have been corrected for multiple comparisons using false discovery rate (FDR) methods
For the low-risk infants, the analysis revealed a significant increase in HbO2 for the social dynamic condition in channel 25 (t (11) = 4.07, P = 0.048, corrected using FDR), which was positioned over the right pSTS-temporoparietal junction (TPJ) region
Summary
The social and communication difficulties that characterize autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are considered the most striking feature of the disorder. The processing of social information is associated with specific brain regions including areas in the temporal lobe – in particular the superior temporal sulcus (STS), temporoparietal junction (TPJ), orbitofrontal cortex, fusiform face area (FFA), as well as the amygdala (Adolphs, 2003). Several neuroimaging studies have reported that individuals with ASD show atypical responses to the processing of social information in these social brain regions (Baron-Cohen et al, 2000b; Amaral et al, 2003; Zilbovicius et al, 2006; Pelphrey et al, 2011; Misra, 2014). Atypicalities include, for example, diminished responses to social sounds (Gervais et al, 2004) and faces (Jemel et al, 2006) as well as altered processing of biological motion (Kaiser & Pelphrey, 2012)
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