Children with autism spectrum disorder show altered functional connectivity and abnormal maturation trajectories in response to inverted faces.
Fahimeh Mamashli, Nataliia Kozhemiako, Sheraz Khan and 8 others
PMID 33709531WHAT IT FOUND
Basic brain responses to inverted faces were similar in children with autism and typically developing children.
Children with autism showed lower local and long-range brain connectivity when viewing inverted faces, and lower frontal connectivity was linked to greater autism severity.
Key findings
01Basic brain responses to inverted faces, houses, and inverted versus upright faces did not differ between groups.
02When inverted faces were compared with houses, children with autism showed lower local brain coupling in the face area, strongest around 50 to 55 Hz.
03Children with autism showed lower long-range connectivity between the face area and left frontal region; this connectivity increased with age in typically developing children but not in autism, and lower connectivity was linked to greater severity.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 21 children with autism and 27 typically developing children, so the findings may not hold in larger or more diverse groups. The study compared groups at one time point, so it cannot show how these connectivity differences develop over time or cause symptoms. Behavioral face-inversion performance was not measured, so the neural findings cannot be extended to the face-inversion effect. Attention was checked only by a button-press task, not eye tracking, so differences in looking at faces cannot be ruled out. The diagnosis classification used the same small sample and the same measures that showed group differences, so it is not a clinical diagnostic test.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest. The article is listed as supported by NIH and non-U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with autism have a general face-recognition problem or that this brain pattern is ready for clinical testing. Basic evoked responses did not differ between groups, behavioral face-inversion data were not collected, and the sample included only 21 children with autism and 27 typically developing children.