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| 2. Functional brain organization in patients with autism and Asperger syndrome. | ||||
| This project examines potential abnormalities of functional brain organization in autism with specific emphasis on individual variability, based on previous PET and fMRI studies (see Figures below). It focuses on language - a domain which not only differentiates autism and Asperger syndrome in terms of delay and deficit, but is also characterized by a wide spectrum of abilities within the adult autistic population. FMRI tasks include auditory and phonological discrimination, and lexical semantic association. It is expected that in autism (and to a lesser extent in AS), pathological disturbance of neural differentiation and impoverished interactive language experience during critical developmental periods result in aberrant neurofunctional maps and abnormally pronounced individual variability. Language delay in autism is further hypothesized to be associated with atypical hemispheric dominance for language. Finally, we expect that individually variable patterns of abnormal functional maps will be correlated with level of language out-come. Identifying such links between brain maps and level of functioning achieved in adults will elucidate the sig-nificance of individual variation in autism in terms of different pathways of etiology and abnormal development. | ||||
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| Atypical dominance for receptive language in autism. Results from a PET study show atypical activation in right prefrontal cortex (green arrow) and lack of normal activation in the left superior temporal lobe (red arrow) in a small sample (N=5) of adult high-functioning autistic patients. The study is published in Müller et al. J Autism Devel Disorders 29 (1999): 19-31. |
Unusual involvement of association cortex in autistic patients during motor learning. In this fMRI study, brief episodes of digit sequence learning were associated with greater than normal activation in prefrontal and inferior parietal cortex and reduced activation in normal loci (premotor and superior parietal cortex). The figure on the left shows main effects of task, whereas task by group interactions are shown on the right. The groupwise findings may be explained by individual variability and scatter of functional maps in autism. |
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