Increased Intra‐Subject Variability of Reaction Times and Single‐Trial Event‐Related Potential Components in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an increasingly common neurodevelopmental disorder that affects 1 in 59 children. The cognitive profiles of individuals with ASD are varied, and the neurophysiological underpinnings of these developmental difficulties are unclear. While many studies have focused on overall group differences in the amplitude or latency of event related potential (ERP) responses, recent research suggests that increased intra‐subject neural variability may also be a reliable indicator of atypical brain function in ASD. This study aimed to identify behavioral and neural variability responses during an emotional inhibitory control task in children with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) children. Children with ASD showed increased variability in response to both inhibitory and emotional stimuli, evidenced by greater reaction time variability and single‐trial ERP variability of N200 and N170 amplitudes and/or latencies compared to TD children. These results suggest that the physiological basis of ASD may be more accurately explained by increased intra‐subject variability, in addition to characteristic increases or decreases in the amplitude or latency of neural responses. Autism Res 2020, 13:221–229. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary The cognitive functions including memory, attention, executive functions, and perception, of individuals with ASD are varied, and the physiological underpinnings of these profiles are unclear. In this study, children with ASD showed increased intra‐subject neural and behavioral variability in response to an emotional inhibitory control task compared to typically developing children. These results suggest that the physiological basis of ASD may also be explained by increased behavioral and neural variability in people with ASD, rather than simply characteristic increases or decreases in averaged brain responses.

Identifying Autism Spectrum Disorder Symptoms Using Response and Gaze Behavior during the Go/NoGo Game CatChicken

“…Even though we observed greater Go and NoGo negative percentages and higher response time variance in ASD children, statistical analysis demonstrated an insignificant difference between the groups. The results contradict previous works that observed greater RT variability of go-response 9 and higher omission error 10 in ASD population than their typical peers. One interpretation of these findings is that the insignificant difference of RT was because this work computed RT of both Go and NoGo trials; Lee et.al 26 found similar RT for ASD and typical subjects.…”

Alpha connectivity and inhibitory control in adults with autism spectrum disorder

“…In addition, we performed an exploratory analysis of the event-related fields generated in response to No-go trials in the Inhibition condition, which revealed that adults with ASD may show some delay in this signal. We specifically observed that the peaks at 200 and 300 ms that have been consistently reported in the response inhibition literature and which have been shown to differ in ASD [129][130][131][132][133], were delayed in the ASD group by ~ 50 ms (Additional file 5: Fig. S2).…”

Understanding the Error in Psychopathology: Notable Intraindividual Differences in Neural Variability of Performance Monitoring

“…Neural activity in spatial and temporal domains is variable across neuroimaging modalities (3), and excessive neural variability appears maladaptive (5,6). For example, participants with autism spectrum disorders exhibit excessive neural variability despite intact mean responses and excessive neural variability might contribute to an unstable perception of social and emotional information (7)(8)(9). Variability in blood-oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal is larger in patients with schizophrenia than in healthy controls, which could indicate disrupted neuronal communication, and variability in BOLD signal distinguishes patients with schizophrenia from those with bipolar disorder (10).…”