The role of MT+/V5 during biological motion perception in Asperger Syndrome: An fMRI study

doi:10.1016/j.rasd.2006.07.002

Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Volume 1, Issue 1, January–March 2007, Pages 14-27

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2006.07.002 Get rights and content

Abstract

Asperger Syndrome (AS), a condition on the autistic spectrum, is characterized by deficits in the ability to use social cues to infer mental state information. Few studies have examined whether these deficits might be understood in terms of differences in visual information processing. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine differences in brain activity among individuals with AS while performing a task that typically leads to the automatic interpretation of human movement. Despite similar behavioural performance, significantly less activity was found for the AS group (relative to a control group) in inferior, middle and superior temporal regions, including the human analogue of MT+/V5. These data suggest that AS is associated with unique patterns of brain activity during the perception of visually presented social cues.

Section snippets

Biological motion, brain function, and autism-spectrum disorders

One of the most salient characteristics of autism-spectrum conditions is the inability to successfully process socially relevant information (Bailey, Phillips, & Rutter, 1996; Baron-Cohen, 1995). A major focus among scientists studying autism and Asperger Syndrome (AS) has been to develop theories to explain this disability. One such theory holds that individuals with autism-spectrum conditions possess a specific deficit in the ability to understand mental states (referred to as a theory of

Participants

Twenty male participants – 10 with a diagnosis of AS and 10 controls (C) – were recruited for participation in the present study. Individuals in the AS group all received a diagnosis using DSM-IV (APA, 1994) and ICD-10 (World Health Organization, 1994), criteria. The mean and standard deviations were 27.6 (7.1) and 25.6 (4.9) years of age for the AS and C groups, respectively. All participants were right-handed. None of the participants reported taking any medication currently or having any

Behavioural response data

See Table 2 for group-wise means and standard deviations of the response accuracy for each condition. Independent-sample t-tests revealed no significant differences between groups in response accuracy for either the biological motion condition or the randomised biological motion condition; ts(18) = .46 and 1.84, respectively, ns.

Biological motion condition

When contrasting brain activity for the walker versus fixation comparison, a number of clusters emerged bilaterally within the posterior portion of the brain (see Fig. 1

Discussion

The current study provides evidence suggesting that individuals with AS show diminished activity in a number of brain regions related to the perception of human movement, including the human analogue of MT+/V5. Furthermore, most of these areas did not differ across groups for the control condition. As both conditions necessitated the perceptual integration of the same number of dots, moving at the same speed over the same visual distance, the primary difference between them is the extent to

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Chris Ashwin, Chris Andrew, Xavier Chitnis and Alison Clare for their technical and administrative assistance in the implementation of this study. This research was supported by the Medical Research Council, UK and the James S. McDonnel Foundation.

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Deficits in social communication and interaction are among the core symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Intention understanding in particular has been shown to be impaired in ASD. However, only one previous study has explicitly assessed the understanding of communicative intentions in ASD. Thus, the aim of the present study was to compare neural activation during the observation of communicative and non-communicative actions in participants with ASD and typically developing (TD) controls using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Based on recent findings that show that the degree of involvement of the observer has an impact on neural activation, the present study included first- and third-person perspective stimuli.
Twenty-five male TD (mean age 20.41 ± 3.39) and twenty-two male participants with ASD (mean age 18.60 ± 3.55) were included. Stimuli consisted of videos in which actors performed an action with an everyday object. Actions were either private or communicative; communicative actions were either directed at the observer (first-person) or at a third person.
The ASD group showed reduced activation in the human middle temporal complex (hMT+) across all conditions. However, modulation of activation in response to different conditions remained intact in ASD. Additionally, while TD showed an increase in premotor cortex (PMC) activation in response to communicative actions directed at them, the ASD group showed a decrease in activation.
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The social brain hypothesis is regarded as a powerful theory to understand social cognition. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have specific deficits in social and communicative behavior, but the exact relationship between these deficits and abnormalities in the social brain remains unclear. The high heritability of this disorder makes it important to focus on the first-degree relatives of those affected. Research focusing on genetically at-risk (yet healthy) relatives of patients with ASD is critical to the study of neuroimaging endophenotypes. We conducted a voxel-wise activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of 9 functional neuroimaging studies published during the period from 2006 to 2018. These studies included 200 individuals with ASD, 216 unaffected family members (UF), and 235 typical development controls (TD). The voxel-wise significance threshold was p < 0.01 (uncorrected p = 0.001).The ALE meta-analyses showed hyperactivation in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and superior temporal gyrus (STG) among individuals with ASD and UF, compared with TD individuals. Group comparisons showed greater likelihood of hyperactivation in the amygdala for ASD, compared with UF and TD.
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The role of MT+/V5 during biological motion perception in Asperger Syndrome: An fMRI study

Abstract

Section snippets

Biological motion, brain function, and autism-spectrum disorders

Participants

Behavioural response data

Biological motion condition

Discussion

Acknowledgements

Trends in Cognitive Science

Trends in Cognitive Science

Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews

Lancet

Trends in Cognitive Science

Current Biology

Current Biology

Neuroimage

Neuroimage

Autism: Towards an integration of clinical, genetic, neuropsychological, and neurobiological perspectives

Journal of Child Psychology, Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines

Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind.

A model of the mindreading system: Neuropsychological and neurobiological perspectives

Recognition of mental state terms: Clinical findings in children with autism and a functional neuroimaging study of adults

British Journal of Psychiatry

Social intelligence in the normal and autistic brain: An fMRI study

European Journal of Neuroscience

Understanding other minds: Perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience

Visual recognition of biological motion is impaired in children with autism

Psychological Science

Specific involvement of human parietal systems and the amygdala in the perception of biological motion

Journal of Neuroscience

Neural correlates of mental transformations of the body-in-space

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U S A

Attribution of mechanical and social causality to animated displays by children with autism

Autism

Colored noise and computational inference in neurophysiological (fMRI) time series analysis: Resampling methods in time and wavelet domains

Human Brain Mapping

Global, voxel, and cluster tests, by theory and permutation, for a difference between two groups of structural MR images of the brain

IEEE Transactions in Medical Imaging

Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes

Brain

The functional neuroanatomy of social behaviour: Changes in cerebral blood flow when people with autistic disorder process facial expressions

Brain

A program to generate synthetic walkers as dynamic point-light displays

Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers

A new anatomical landmark for reliable identification of human area V5/MT: A quantitative analysis of sulcal patterning

Cerebral Cortex

Interacting minds: A biological basis

Science

The physiological basis of theory of mind