scholarly journals Sylvian Fissure and Parietal Anatomy in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey A. Knaus ◽  
Helen Tager-Flusberg ◽  
Anne L. Foundas

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social functioning and language and communication, with restricted interests or stereotyped behaviors. Anatomical differences have been found in the parietal cortex in children with ASD, but parietal subregions and associations between Sylvian fissure (SF) and parietal anatomy have not been explored. In this study, SF length and anterior and posterior parietal volumes were measured on MRI in 30 right-handed boys with ASD and 30 right-handed typically developing boys (7–14 years), matched on age and non-verbal IQ. There was leftward SF and anterior parietal asymmetry, and rightward posterior parietal asymmetry, across groups. There were associations between SF and parietal asymmetries, with slight group differences. Typical SF asymmetry was associated with typical anterior and posterior parietal asymmetry, in both groups. In the atypical SF asymmetry group, controls had atypical parietal asymmetry, whereas in ASD there were more equal numbers of individuals with typical as atypical anterior parietal asymmetry. We did not find significant anatomical-behavioral associations. Our findings of more individuals in the ASD group having a dissociation between cortical asymmetries warrants further investigation of these subgroups and emphasizes the importance of investigating anatomical relationships in addition to group differences in individual regions.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aida Khozaei ◽  
Hadi Moradi ◽  
Reshad Hosseini ◽  
Hamidreza Pouretemad ◽  
Bahareh Eskandari

AbstractDue to the importance of automatic and early autism screening, in this paper, a cry-based screening approach for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is introduced. During the study, we realized that the ASD specific features are not necessarily observable among all children with ASD and among all instances of each child. Therefore, we proposed a new classification approach to be able to find such features and their corresponding instances. We tested the proposed approach and found two features that can be used to distinguish groups of children with ASD from Typically Developing (TD) children. In other words, these features are present in subsets of children with ASD not all of them. The approach has been tested on a dataset including 14 boys and 7 girls with ASD and 14 TD boys and 7 TD girls, between 18 to 53 months old. The sensitivity, specificity, and precision of the proposed approach for boys were 85.71%, 100%, and 92.85%, respectively. These measures were 71.42%, 100%, and 85.71% for girls, respectively.


Autism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 639-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa M Vogan ◽  
Benjamin R Morgan ◽  
Mary Lou Smith ◽  
Margot J Taylor

This study examined functional changes longitudinally over 2 years in neural correlates associated with working memory in youth with and without autism spectrum disorder, and the impact of increasing cognitive load. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a visuo-spatial 1-back task with four levels of difficulty. A total of 14 children with autism spectrum disorder and 15 typically developing children (ages 7–13) were included at baseline and followed up approximately 2 years later. Despite similar task performance between groups, differences were evident in the developmental trajectories of neural responses. Typically developing children showed greater load-dependent activation which intensified over time in the frontal, parietal and occipital lobes and the right fusiform gyrus, compared to those with autism spectrum disorder. Children with autism spectrum disorder showed minimal age-related changes in load-dependent activation, but greater longitudinal load-dependent deactivation in default mode network compared to typically developing children. Results suggest inadequate modulation of neural activity with increasing cognitive demands in children with autism spectrum disorder, which does not mature into adolescence, unlike their typically developing peers. Diminished ability for children with autism spectrum disorder to modulate neural activity during this period of maturation suggests that they may be more vulnerable to the increasing complexity of social and academic demands as they progress through adolescence than their peers.


Autism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 1018-1027
Author(s):  
Susan B Campbell ◽  
Jessie B Northrup ◽  
Amy B Tavares

Children with autism spectrum disorder often demonstrate difficulties with self-regulation, although studies of this construct in young children with autism spectrum disorder are limited. In this study, developmental changes were examined using a measure of self-regulation appropriate for young children, resistance to temptation. At 22, 28, and 34 months, toddlers with an older sibling with autism spectrum disorder (high risk) and toddlers with typically developing older siblings (low risk) were presented with an appealing toy and instructed not to touch it. Observers coded whether or not children touched the toy and the strategies they used to resist touching it. At 36 months, children were assessed for autism spectrum disorder, yielding three groups: high risk children with autism spectrum disorder, high risk children without autism spectrum disorder, and low risk children. At 22 months, most children, regardless of group, touched the forbidden toy; at 28 and 34 months, many high risk children without autism spectrum disorder and low risk children resisted the temptation to touch the toy, whereas most of the children with autism spectrum disorder did not. Differences in delay strategies were also evident. Some, but not all group differences, were accounted for by differences in language ability. Results highlight one early index of impulse control that differentiates children with emerging autism spectrum disorder from age-mates prior to the third birthday.


Autism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 424-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Bottema-Beutel ◽  
Tiffany Woynaroski ◽  
Rebecca Louick ◽  
Elizabeth Stringer Keefe ◽  
Linda R Watson ◽  
...  

We examined differences between children with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing children over an 8-month period in: (a) longitudinal associations between expressive and receptive vocabulary and (b) the extent to which caregiver utterances provided within an “optimal” engagement state mediated the pathway from early expressive to later receptive vocabulary. In total, 59 children (28–53 months at Time 1) comprised the autism spectrum disorder group and 46 children (8–24 months at Time 1) comprised the typically developing group. Groups were matched on initial vocabulary sizes. Results showed that the association between early expressive and later receptive vocabulary was moderated by group. A moderated mediation effect was also found, indicating linguistic input provided within an optimal engagement state only mediated associations for the autism spectrum disorder group.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanako YOSHIDA ◽  
Paul CIRINO ◽  
Sarah S. MIRE ◽  
Joseph M. BURLING ◽  
Sunbok LEE

AbstractThe present study focused on parents’ social cue use in relation to young children's attention. Participants were ten parent–child dyads; all children were 36 to 60 months old and were either typically developing (TD) or were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children wore a head-mounted camera that recorded the proximate child view while their parent played with them. The study compared the following between the TD and ASD groups: (a) frequency of parent's gesture use; (b) parents’ monitoring of their child's face; and (c) how children looked at parents’ gestures. Results from Bayesian estimation indicated that, compared to the TD group, parents of children with ASD produced more gestures, more closely monitored their children's faces, and provided more scaffolding for their children's visual experiences. Our findings suggest the importance of further investigating parents’ visual and gestural scaffolding as a potential developmental mechanism for children's early learning, including for children with ASD.


Autism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lacey Chetcuti ◽  
Kristelle Hudry ◽  
Megan Grant ◽  
Giacomo Vivanti

We examined the role of social motivation and motor execution factors in object-directed imitation difficulties in autism spectrum disorder. A series of to-be-imitated actions was presented to 35 children with autism spectrum disorder and 20 typically developing children on an Apple® iPad® by a socially responsive or aloof model, under conditions of low and high motor demand. There were no differences in imitation performance (i.e. the number of actions reproduced within a fixed sequence), for either group, in response to a model who acted socially responsive or aloof. Children with autism spectrum disorder imitated the high motor demand task more poorly than the low motor demand task, while imitation performance for typically developing children was equivalent across the low and high motor demand conditions. Furthermore, imitative performance in the autism spectrum disorder group was unrelated to social reciprocity, though positively associated with fine motor coordination. These results suggest that difficulties in object-directed imitation in autism spectrum disorder are the result of motor execution difficulties, not reduced social motivation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (25) ◽  
pp. 7868-7872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Turi ◽  
David C. Burr ◽  
Roberta Igliozzi ◽  
David Aagten-Murphy ◽  
Filippo Muratori ◽  
...  

Autism is known to be associated with major perceptual atypicalities. We have recently proposed a general model to account for these atypicalities in Bayesian terms, suggesting that autistic individuals underuse predictive information or priors. We tested this idea by measuring adaptation to numerosity stimuli in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). After exposure to large numbers of items, stimuli with fewer items appear to be less numerous (and vice versa). We found that children with ASD adapted much less to numerosity than typically developing children, although their precision for numerosity discrimination was similar to that of the typical group. This result reinforces recent findings showing reduced adaptation to facial identity in ASD and goes on to show that reduced adaptation is not unique to faces (social stimuli with special significance in autism), but occurs more generally, for both parietal and temporal functions, probably reflecting inefficiencies in the adaptive interpretation of sensory signals. These results provide strong support for the Bayesian theories of autism.


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