Neural Basis of Visual Attentional Orienting in Childhood Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Eric R Murphy, Megan Norr, John F Strang and 3 others
PMID 27696176WHAT IT FOUND
Children with ASD and controls showed similar attention bias on a visual task, but brain responses differed.
Controls activated attention regions when a solid patch appeared beside a patterned patch; children with ASD activated them when two solid patches appeared.
Key findings
01Attention bias toward solid-color patches was seen in 21 of 23 children with ASD and 23 of 35 controls.
02Five clusters showed opposite activation patterns: controls had greater activation during biased trials, children with ASD during neutral trials.
03In children with ASD, greater activation during neutral trials in the left pre- and postcentral gyrus and posterior cingulate/precuneus was associated with more severe restricted and repetitive behavior scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study compared groups at one time and did not test any treatment, so it cannot say what will help a child. It analysed 23 children with ASD and 35 control children, and dropped 5 additional ASD and 3 control children for motion. The children had IQ scores at least 80, so the results may not apply to children with more severe intellectual disability. Five children with ASD had stimulants withheld for at least 24 hours, and one had medications that could not be withdrawn. The visual stimuli varied several salience channels at once, so the study could not identify which visual feature drove the brain difference. The design cannot distinguish hyper-responsivity to visual salience from preference for sameness. The brain-activation and symptom correlations were only in children with ASD and do not show cause.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with ASD have a different attention bias. Both groups were faster to solid patches, and the group-by-trial-type interaction was not significant. Do not use the brain activation differences as a treatment target. The study did not test an intervention, and it could not tell whether the activation pattern reflects hyper-responsivity to salience or preference for sameness.