Intact neural representations of affective meaning of touch but lack of embodied resonance in autism: a multi-voxel pattern analysis study.
Haemy Lee Masson, Ineke Pillet, Steffie Amelynck and 4 others
PMID 31798816WHAT IT FOUND
Adults with autism rated hugs and hand-holding as less pleasant than controls, but both groups distinguished social from non-social touch.
Autism showed weaker body-based brain responses to touch meaning, not a general inability to understand social touch.
Key findings
01Adults with autism rated positive touch videos as less pleasant than neurotypical adults, while ratings of negative and non-social touch did not differ between groups.
02Both groups showed similar brain-pattern selectivity for distinguishing social from non-social touch, including in somatosensory and social-cognition regions.
03Adults with autism showed weaker overall-affect representations in BA1 and BA2 than controls, but not in TPJ or BA3.
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 adult men with autism who had average to above-average intelligence and no language deficits, so it says little about children, women, or people with more severe autism or lower IQ. The task was relatively simple, watching touch videos while detecting shirt color, so intact social-cognition responses may not hold for more demanding social situations. The study did not test any treatment, so it cannot show that touch-based or body-based therapy will help. Some touch-related brain regions were excluded because they did not activate consistently or were too variable between people. The sample was small and selective, and the group differences were based on brain-pattern analyses, not clinical outcomes.
Declared interests
The paper lists funding from the Marguerite-Marie Delacroix foundation, H2020 European Research Council, Hercules Foundation, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, and The Excellence of Science. It does not provide an author conflict-of-interest statement.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the weaker body-based brain responses as proof that touch-based therapy will help adults with autism. The study measured brain patterns while watching touch videos, not treatment outcomes, and it included only adult men with average to above-average intelligence.