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PLoS One. 2014 Dec 2;9(12):e113879. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0113879. eCollection 2014.

Identifying autism from neural representations of social interactions: neurocognitive markers of autism.

Author information

  • 1Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
  • 2Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America; Brain Institute of Rio Grande do Sul (InsCer/RS), Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
  • 3Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.

Abstract

Autism is a psychiatric/neurological condition in which alterations in social interaction (among other symptoms) are diagnosed by behavioral psychiatric methods. The main goal of this study was to determine how the neural representations and meanings of social concepts (such as to insult) are altered in autism. A second goal was to determine whether these alterations can serve as neurocognitive markers of autism. The approach is based on previous advances in fMRI analysis methods that permit (a) the identification of a concept, such as the thought of a physical object, from its fMRI pattern, and (b) the ability to assess the semantic content of a concept from its fMRI pattern. These factor analysis and machine learning methods were applied to the fMRI activation patterns of 17 adults with high-functioning autism and matched controls, scanned while thinking about 16 social interactions. One prominent neural representation factor that emerged (manifested mainly in posterior midline regions) was related to self-representation, but this factor was present only for the control participants, and was near-absent in the autism group. Moreover, machine learning algorithms classified individuals as autistic or control with 97% accuracy from their fMRI neurocognitive markers. The findings suggest that psychiatric alterations of thought can begin to be biologically understood by assessing the form and content of the altered thought's underlying brain activation patterns.
PMID:
25461818
[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
PMCID:
PMC4251975
Free PMC Article
Images from this publication.See all images (4)Free text 
Figure 1
Figure 1
Schematic diagram of the two-level exploratory factor analysis procedure.
The first level factor analyses are performed separately for participants 1–13. In these analyses, the activation levels of 135 voxels (marked as red, green, and blue circles for the 3 participants) distributed throughout the brain are expressed via 7 factors (Fa-Fg), and some (but not all) of the voxels are linked to these factors. The second, group-level FA in turn expresses the 13×7 first-level factors in terms of 4 group factors (GF1–GF4). For each of these factors, the originating voxels are spatially clustered. A cluster of such voxels (characterized as a sphere) contains voxels that were initially selected from many (typically all) of the participants. The six largest spheres per factor were treated as the factor-associated brain locations.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Posterior midline self factor location.
A. Location of the voxels (circled) derived from the factor analysis of the Control Group that defined the posterior cingulate/precuneus sphere of this group’s self factor. Voxels in this cluster (with MNI x-coordinates extending from 0 to −9) are shown projected on the mid-sagittal plane. (The coordinates and radii of all 6 spheres associated with this factor are shown in Table S1 in ). B. Mean activation in midline brain structures for the verb hug (averaged over agent and recipient roles) for the two groups, differing in posterior cingulate/precuneus. The verb hug was chosen for illustration here because of the salience of hugging as a social interaction in autism, where enveloping pressure is sometimes desired but without physical contact between oneself with another person, as in Temple Grandin’s squeeze machine . The depiction of the activation in this slice for all of the other verbs was very similar to hug, for both groups.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Degree of alteration of self-related activation in autism (estimated by its stability in posterior cingulate/precuneus) and its relation to social processing ability measured by the Benton Facial Recognition Test .
Both measures were adjusted for participants’ age and full scale IQ. One participant with autism did not have a Benton Test score.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Social Interactions-Fixation contrasts for the two groups.
The uncorrected p-threshold is 0.001 and the extent threshold is 5 voxels for both groups.
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