Visual Attention in Autism Families: ‘Unaffected’ Sibs Share Atypical Frontal Activation

Matthew K Belmonte
Marie Gomot
Simon Baron-Cohen

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 51(3):259-276 (March 2010).

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ABSTRACT

Background: In addition to their more clinically evident abnormalities of social cognition, people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) manifest perturbations of attention and sensory perception which may offer insights into the underlying neural abnormalities. Similar autistic traits in ASC relatives without a diagnosis suggest a continuity between clinically affected and unaffected family members. Methods: We applied fMRI in the context of a non-social task of visual attention in order to determine whether this continuity persists at the level of brain physiology. Results: Both boys with ASC and clinically unaffected brothers of people with ASC were impaired at a visual divided-attention task demanding conjunction of attributes from rapidly and simultaneously presented, spatially disjoint stimuli and suppression of spatially intervening distractors. In addition, both groups in comparison to controls manifested atypical fronto-cerebellar activation as a function of distractor congruence, and the degree of this frontal atypicality correlated with psychometric measures of autistic traits in ASC and sibs. Despite these resemblances between the ASC and sib groups, an exploratory, hypothesis-generating analysis of correlations across brain regions revealed a decrease in overall functional correlation only in the ASC group and not in the sibs. Conclusions: These results establish a neurophysiological correlate of familial susceptibility to ASC, and suggest that whilst abnormal time courses of frontal activation may reflect processes permissive of autistic brain development, abnormal patterns of functional correlation across a wider array of brain regions may relate more closely to autism’s determinants.

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CITED IN PUBLICATIONS BY OTHERS:

  1. Boso M, Emanuele E, Prestori F, Politi P, Barale F, D'Angelo E. Autism and genius: Is there a link? The involvement of central brain loops and hypotheses for functional testing. Functional Neurology 25(1):27-32 (January-March 2010).
  2. Elsabbagh M, Johnson MH. Getting answers from babies about autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(2):81-87 (February 2010).

CITED IN MY OTHER PUBLICATIONS:

  1. Belmonte MK. What’s the story behind ‘theory of mind’ and autism? Journal of Consciousness Studies 16(6-8):118-139 (June-August 2009).