Neural Basis of Self and Other Representation in Autism: An fMRI Study of Self-Face Recognition

Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by decreased interest and engagement in social interactions and by enhanced self-focus. While previous theoretical approaches to understanding autism have emphasized social impairments and altered interpersonal interactions, there is a recent shift towards understanding the nature of the representation of the self in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Still, the neural mechanisms subserving self-representations in ASD are relatively unexplored.We used event-related fMRI to investigate brain responsiveness to images of the subjects' own face and to faces of others. Children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children viewed randomly presented digital morphs between their own face and a gender-matched other face, and made "self/other" judgments. Both groups of children activated a right premotor/prefrontal system when identifying images containing a greater percentage of the self face. However, while TD children showed activation of this system during both self- and other-processing, children with ASD only recruited this system while viewing images containing mostly their own face.This functional dissociation between the representation of self versus others points to a potential neural substrate for the characteristic self-focus and decreased social understanding exhibited by these individuals, and suggests that individuals with ASD lack the shared neural representations for self and others that TD children and adults possess and may use to understand others

Atypical Social Modulation of Imitation in Autism Spectrum Conditions.

Appropriate modulation of imitation according to social context is important for successful social interaction. In the present study we subliminally primed high-functioning adults with ASC and age- and IQ-matched controls with either a pro- or non- social attitude. Following priming, an automatic imitation paradigm was used to acquire an index of imitation. Whereas imitation levels were higher for pro-socially primed relative to non-socially primed control participants, there was no difference between pro- and non- socially primed individuals with ASC. We conclude that high-functioning adults with ASC demonstrate atypical social modulation of imitation. Given the importance of imitation in social interaction we speculate that difficulties with the modulation of imitation may contribute to the social problems characteristic of ASC

Genetic and neurological foundations of customer orientation: field and experimental evidence

We explore genetic and neurological bases for customer orientation (CO) and contrast them with sales orientation (SO). Study 1 is a field study that establishes that CO, but not SO, leads to greater opportunity recognition. Study 2 examines genetic bases for CO and finds that salespeople with CO are more likely to have the 7R variant of the DRD4 gene. This is consistent with basic research on dopamine receptor activity in the brain that underlies novelty seeking, the reward function, and risk taking. Study 3 examines the neural basis of CO and finds that salespeople with CO, but not SO, experience greater activation of their mirror neuron systems and neural processes associated with empathy. Managerial and research implications are discussed

Intention Understanding in Autism

When we observe a motor act (e.g. grasping a cup) done by another individual, we extract, according to how the motor act is performed and its context, two types of information: the goal (grasping) and the intention underlying it (e.g. grasping for drinking). Here we examined whether children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are able to understand these two aspects of motor acts. Two experiments were carried out. In the first, one group of high-functioning children with ASD and one of typically developing (TD) children were presented with pictures showing hand-object interactions and asked what the individual was doing and why. In half of the “why” trials the observed grip was congruent with the function of the object (“why-use” trials), in the other half it corresponded to the grip typically used to move that object (“why-place” trials). The results showed that children with ASD have no difficulties in reporting the goals of individual motor acts. In contrast they made several errors in the why task with all errors occurring in the “why-place” trials. In the second experiment the same two groups of children saw pictures showing a hand-grip congruent with the object use, but within a context suggesting either the use of the object or its placement into a container. Here children with ASD performed as TD children, correctly indicating the agent's intention. In conclusion, our data show that understanding others' intentions can occur in two ways: by relying on motor information derived from the hand-object interaction, and by using functional information derived from the object's standard use. Children with ASD have no deficit in the second type of understanding, while they have difficulties in understanding others' intentions when they have to rely exclusively on motor cues

Diminished Medial Prefrontal Activity behind Autistic Social Judgments of Incongruent Information

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tend to make inadequate social judgments, particularly when the nonverbal and verbal emotional expressions of other people are incongruent. Although previous behavioral studies have suggested that ASD individuals have difficulty in using nonverbal cues when presented with incongruent verbal-nonverbal information, the neural mechanisms underlying this symptom of ASD remain unclear. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we compared brain activity in 15 non-medicated adult males with high-functioning ASD to that of 17 age-, parental-background-, socioeconomic-, and intelligence-quotient-matched typically-developed (TD) male participants. Brain activity was measured while each participant made friend or foe judgments of realistic movies in which professional actors spoke with conflicting nonverbal facial expressions and voice prosody. We found that the ASD group made significantly less judgments primarily based on the nonverbal information than the TD group, and they exhibited significantly less brain activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex/ventral medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/vmPFC), and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) than the TD group. Among these five regions, the ACC/vmPFC and dmPFC were most involved in nonverbal-information-biased judgments in the TD group. Furthermore, the degree of decrease of the brain activity in these two brain regions predicted the severity of autistic communication deficits. The findings indicate that diminished activity in the ACC/vmPFC and dmPFC underlies the impaired abilities of individuals with ASD to use nonverbal content when making judgments regarding other people based on incongruent social information

Neural Reactivity to Emotional Faces May Mediate the Relationship Between Childhood Empathy and Adolescent Prosocial Behavior.

Reactivity to others' emotions not only can result in empathic concern (EC), an important motivator of prosocial behavior, but can also result in personal distress (PD), which may hinder prosocial behavior. Examining neural substrates of emotional reactivity may elucidate how EC and PD differentially influence prosocial behavior. Participants (N = 57) provided measures of EC, PD, prosocial behavior, and neural responses to emotional expressions at ages 10 and 13. Initial EC predicted subsequent prosocial behavior. Initial EC and PD predicted subsequent reactivity to emotions in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and inferior parietal lobule, respectively. Activity in the IFG, a region linked to mirror neuron processes, as well as cognitive control and language, mediated the relation between initial EC and subsequent prosocial behavior

Impairment of actions chains in autism and its possible role in intention understanding

Experiments in monkeys demonstrated that many parietal and premotor neurons coding a specific motor act (e.g., grasping) show a markedly different activation when this act is part of actions that have different goals (e.g., grasping for eating vs. grasping for placing). Many of these “action-constrained” neurons have mirror properties firing selectively to the observation of the initial motor act of the actions to which they belong motorically. By activating a specific action chain from its very outset, this mechanism allows the observers to have an internal copy of the whole action before its execution, thus enabling them to understand directly the agent's intention. Using electromyographic recordings, we show that a similar chained organization exists in typically developing children, whereas it is impaired in children with autism. We propose that, as a consequence of this functional impairment, high-functioning autistic children may understand the intentions of others cognitively but lack the mechanism for understanding them experientially