The Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism Spectrum Disorders

National Institute Of Mental Health

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

This past year we have continued to evaluate the neural and behavioral characteristics of high-functioning individuals with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). A critical limitation that has hampered previous studies on the neural underpinnings of ASD has been a lack of a comprehensive map of the functional topography of the ASD brain. To address this issue, we used high-quality resting state functional MRI connectivity data and a newly developed brain parcellation routine developed in our lab (Shao et al., 2024) to provide a whole-brain map of functional networks in a group of seventy high-functioning individuals with ASD and a group of seventy typically developing (TD) individuals. The resting state functional fMRI data were collected using an imaging sequence optimized to achieve high temporal signal-to-noise ratio (tSNR) across the whole-brain. Our brain parcellation routine intrinsically incorporates internal consistency and repeatability of the discovered brain networks by keeping only network distinctions that agree across halves of the data over multiple random iterations in each group. The study groups were tightly matched on tSNR, in-scanner motion, age, and IQ. We compared the maps from each group and found that functional networks in the ASD group are atypical in three seemingly related ways: (1) whole-brain connectivity patterns are less stable in multiple functional networks, (2) the cerebellum, subcortex, and hippocampus show weaker differentiation of their functional subnetworks, and (3) subcortical structures and the hippocampus are atypically integrated with the neocortex. These results were statistically robust and suggest that patterns of network connectivity between the neocortex and the cerebellum, subcortical structures, and hippocampus are atypical in ASD individuals (Persichetti et al., Molecular Psychiatry, 2025). We have also addressed a recent hypothesis generated by our lab concerning impaired spatial navigation ability in high-functioning ASD individuals (Agron et al., Autism Research, 2023). Neuroimaging studies of typically developing (TD) individuals have shown that a region of the brain - the retrosplenial complex (RSC) – is critically and selectively involved in one aspect of navigation, memory-guided navigation. A defining feature of the functioning of this brain region is its involvement in scene, but not human face, perception. Therefore, we predicted that scene-selectivity would be weaker in the RSC of individuals with ASD compared to a TD control group. We used functional MRI to scan groups of ASD individuals and matched TD individuals while they viewed pictures of scenes and faces. As predicted, scene-selectivity was significantly lower in the ASD group compared to the TD group in the RSC, but not in brain regions involved in other aspects of navigation ability. These results suggest that impaired memory-guided navigation in individuals with ASD may, in part, be due to atypical functioning in the RSC (Persichetti et al., Autism Research, 2025).