PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
While fronto-posterior underconnectivity has often been reported in autism, it was shown that different contexts may modulate between-group differences in functional connectivity. Here, we assessed how different task paradigms modulate functional connectivity differences in a young autistic sample relative to typically developing children. Twenty-three autistic and 23 typically developing children aged 6 to 15 years underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while completing a reasoning task with visuospatial versus semantic content. We observed distinct connectivity patterns in autistic versus typical children as a function of task type (visuospatial vs. semantic) and problem complexity (visual matching vs. reasoning), despite similar performance. For semantic reasoning problems, there was no significant between-group differences in connectivity. However, during visuospatial reasoning problems, we observed occipital-occipital, occipital-temporal, and occipital-frontal over-connectivity in autistic children relative to typical children. Also, increasing the complexity of visuospatial problems resulted in increased functional connectivity between occipital, posterior (temporal), and anterior (frontal) brain regions in autistic participants, more so than in typical children. Our results add to several studies now demonstrating that the connectivity alterations in autistic relative to neurotypical individuals are much more complex than previously thought and depend on both task type and task complexity and their respective underlying cognitive processes.
摘要：
虽然自闭症中经常有前后连接不足的报道，研究表明,不同的环境可能会调节功能连接的组间差异.这里,我们评估了不同的任务范式如何调节年轻自闭症患者样本中相对于发育正常儿童的功能连接差异.23名自闭症患者和23名年龄在6至15岁之间的儿童进行了功能磁共振成像（fMRI）扫描，同时完成了具有视觉空间和语义内容的推理任务。我们观察到自闭症儿童和典型儿童中不同的连接模式作为任务类型的函数(视觉空间与语义)和问题复杂性(视觉匹配与推理)，尽管表现相似。对于语义推理问题，组间连通性无显著差异.然而,在视觉空间推理问题中，我们观察了枕骨-枕骨,枕部-颞部,与典型儿童相比，自闭症儿童的枕骨-额叶过度连接。此外，视觉空间问题的复杂性增加导致枕骨之间的功能连通性增加，后部（颞部），自闭症参与者的前部（额叶）大脑区域，比典型的孩子更多。我们的结果增加了几项研究，现在表明自闭症患者相对于神经典型个体的连通性改变比以前认为的要复杂得多，并且取决于任务类型和任务复杂性以及它们各自的潜在认知过程。
