Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project.
Carolin Moessnang, Sarah Baumeister, Julian Tillmann and 30 others
PMID 32087753WHAT IT FOUND
In a large brain-imaging study, adults and children with autism showed the same brain activation as typically developing people when watching animations of moving shapes.
The expected difference in the 'social brain' was absent, even though the task reliably activated these regions in everyone.
Key findings
01Increasing mentalizing demands led to robust activation in key social brain regions (pSTS and dmPFC) in both groups, confirming the task works as expected.
02There were no significant differences in brain activation between individuals with autism and typically developing controls, either across the whole brain or in specific regions of interest.
03Behavioral performance on the task did not differ between diagnostic groups; however, older participants performed better than younger ones regardless of diagnosis.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample excluded individuals with an IQ below 75, so findings may not apply to those with intellectual disability. The cohort was relatively mild in symptom severity compared to the broader autism population. The task included an explicit categorization component, which may have allowed participants to use compensatory strategies not available in real-life social interactions. The study did not find the expected reduced activation in the social brain, contradicting earlier smaller studies.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative, the Seventh Framework Programme, and the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of group differences in brain activation as evidence that social communication deficits in autism are not real or not neurobiological. The study used a specific implicit mentalizing task with an explicit response component, and the sample was highly verbal and of average-to-high IQ, which may not reflect the full heterogeneity of autism.