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Testing Sensory and Multisensory Function in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Published on: April 22, 2015
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Neural substrates of numerosity estimation in autism
Emilie Meaux1, Margot J Taylor, Elizabeth W Pang
1Laboratory for Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Neurosciences and Clinical Neurology, University Medical Centre, Geneva, Switzerland.
Human Brain Mapping
|March 19, 2014
Summary
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show altered brain activity during number estimation, with differences in visual and temporal processing, suggesting widespread functional abnormalities in autism.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Developmental Psychology
Background:
- Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit enhanced visual skills, including numerosity estimation, potentially due to a local feature processing bias.
- The neural underpinnings of numerosity estimation in ASD, particularly disentangling perceptual atypicalities from core number processing, remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the neural correlates of numerosity estimation in adults with and without ASD.
- To examine how the global arrangement of visual stimuli influences numerosity processing in ASD compared to typically developed (TD) individuals.
Main Methods:
- Magnetoencephalography (MEG) was used to record brain activity in 14 adults with ASD and 14 matched TD controls.
- Participants estimated the number of dots (80-150) presented in random (local) or meaningful (global) patterns.
Main Results:
- Behavioral performance showed no significant group differences in estimation errors, but ASD participants exhibited more variable numerosity estimation.
- MEG revealed significant group differences in brain activity, starting in visual areas (80-120 ms), then temporal and parietal regions (120-400 ms), and finally the superior frontal gyrus in TD only (>400 ms).
- Temporal lobe activation differed in its sensitivity to global stimulus arrangement between ASD and TD groups.
Conclusions:
- Individuals with ASD display widespread functional brain abnormalities during numerosity estimation.
- Atypicalities in temporal regions may relate to altered global perception in ASD.
- Observed occipital, parietal, and frontal differences suggest abnormalities in visual input processing, neural coding, and cognitive decision-making stages in ASD.
