Reduced functional connectivity between V1 and inferior frontal cortex associated with visuomotor performance in autism

Abstract

Some recent evidence has suggested abnormalities of the dorsal stream and possibly the mirror neuron system in autism, which may be responsible for impairments of joint attention, imitation, and secondarily for language delays. The current study investigates functional connectivity along the dorsal stream in autism, examining interregional blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal cross-correlation during visuomotor coordination. Eight high-functioning autistic men and 8 handedness and age-matched controls were included. Visually prompted button presses were performed with the preferred hand. For each subject, functional connectivity was computed in terms of BOLD signal correlation with the mean time series in bilateral visual area 17. Our hypothesis of reduced dorsal stream connectivity in autism was only in part confirmed. Functional connectivity with superior parietal areas was not significantly reduced. However, the autism group showed significantly reduced connectivity with bilateral inferior frontal area 44, which is compatible with the hypothesis of mirror neuron defects in autism. More generally, our findings suggest that dorsal stream connectivity in autism may not be fully functional.

Brain dynamics in ASD during movie‐watching show idiosyncratic functional integration and segregation

“…Accordingly, coordinated processing between separate brain regions, known as functional connectivity (FC), that is, typically quantified by correlational measures of statistical interdependency (Friston, 1994), has been assessed in resting‐state (Di Martino et al, 2014; Gotts et al, 2012; Supekar et al, 2013) and in a variety of tasks probing speech comprehension (Just, Cherkassky, Keller, & Minshew, 2004), visuomotor performance (Mizuno, Villalobos, Davies, Dahl, & Müller, 2006; Turner, Frost, Linsenbardt, McIlroy, & Müller, 2006; Villalobos, Mizuno, Dahl, Kemmotsu, & Müller, 2005), visuospatial abilities (Damarla et al, 2010; Liu, Cherkassky, Minshew, & Just, 2011), face processing (Kleinhans et al, 2008; Rudie et al, 2012), or executive functions (Just, Cherkassky, Keller, Kana, & Minshew, 2007; Kana, Keller, Minshew, & Just, 2007; Koshino et al, 2008). The big picture emerging from those reports is lowered FC between frontal and posterior brain regions (see Vissers, Cohen, & Geurts, 2012 for a review), as formulated in the underconnectivity theory of autism (Just, Keller, Malave, Kana, & Varma, 2012).…”

fMRI Investigation of Working Memory for Faces in Autism: Visual Coding and Underconnectivity with Frontal Areas

“…The underconnectivity theory proposed by Just et al (2004) is based in part on the observation that in fMRI studies, individuals with autism display lower functional connectivity than controls, particularly between frontal and posterior areas, in a number of tasks. Functional underconnectivity in an fMRI study was first reported in autism in a sentence comprehension task (Just et al 2004), then in a letter n-back working memory task (Koshino et al 2005), a visuomotor task (Villalobos et al 2005), an executive functioning task , an imagery task , an inhibition task (Kana et al in press), and in a fixation resting state . The fMRI findings are consistent with, but much finer-grained than earlier positron emission tomography (PET)--based evidence of lower functional connectivity in autism, where functional connectivity was measured as the correlation across participants between their activation levels (averaged over minutes of activation) in 2 brain areas.…”

Dar corpo à didática: diálogos internacionais

“…In this direction, are also significant the studies that were developed in the 2000s, aimed at the connection between autistic disorders and dysfunctions of the mirror neurons [11][12][13][14] . Such studies explain the difficulties of autistic subjects on imitation, both in the motor level and linguistic level, in interpreting (1) Understood as the space between the phenomenological qualities of experience and quantitative measures of physics, such as the delightful sensation of speed in a race and the distance traveled with the speed reached in it.…”