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Updated: Jun 25, 2025
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Comparing Eye-tracking Data of Children with High-functioning ASD, Comorbid ADHD, and of a Control Watching Social Videos
Published on: December 7, 2018
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Prefrontal Cortex Responses to Social Video Stimuli in Young Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder
Candida Barreto1, Adrian Curtin1, Yigit Topoglu1
1School of Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Health Systems, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Brain Sciences
|May 25, 2024
Summary
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show higher prefrontal cortex activity during social tasks. This brain activity correlates with ASD symptom severity, suggesting fNIRS can measure social brain function in young children.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Biomedical Engineering
Background:
- Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) impacts social interaction and is a global neurodevelopmental concern.
- Understanding the neural basis of social deficits in children with ASD is limited by traditional neuroimaging constraints.
- Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) offers a portable solution for monitoring brain activity in pediatric populations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity in young children with and without ASD during social and nonsocial video viewing using fNIRS.
- To explore the relationship between PFC activity, social stimuli, and ASD symptom severity.
- To assess the utility of fNIRS for neuroergonomic assessment in young children with ASD.
Main Methods:
- Utilized fNIRS to measure cerebral hemodynamics in the PFC of young children.
- Compared brain activity between children with ASD and typically developing children while viewing social and nonsocial video clips.
- Correlated fNIRS-measured brain activity with clinical ASD measures.
Main Results:
- Children with ASD exhibited significantly higher medial PFC activity in response to social stimuli compared to controls.
- This heightened PFC activation during social video viewing was associated with greater ASD symptom severity.
- fNIRS provided ecologically valid brain activity measurements in toddlers and preschoolers with ASD.
Conclusions:
- Medial PFC hyperactivity during social processing may be a neural correlate of ASD in young children.
- fNIRS is a viable tool for studying brain mechanisms underlying social deficits in pediatric ASD.
- Neuroergonomic approaches using fNIRS can assess cognitive load in response to dynamic social stimuli in young children.
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