Social inference brain networks in autistic adults during movie-viewing: functional specialization and heterogeneity.

Background: Difficulty in social inferences is a core feature in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). On the behavioral level, it remains unclear whether reasoning about others' mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM) and empathic responses to others' physical states may be similarly or differentially affected in autism. On the neural level, these inferences typically engage distinct brain networks (ToM versus Pain networks), but their functional specialization remains not well understood in autism.

A next-generation, histological atlas of the human brain and its application to automated brain MRI segmentation.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the standard tool to image the human brain In this domain, digital brain atlases are essential for subject-specific segmentation of anatomical regions of interest (ROIs) and spatial comparison of neuroanatomy from different subjects in a common coordinate frame. High-resolution, digital atlases derived from histology (e.g.

Resting-State Functional Connectivity of the Amygdala in Autism: A Preregistered Large-Scale Study.

Objective: Three leading neurobiological hypotheses about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) propose underconnectivity between brain regions, atypical function of the amygdala, and generally higher variability between individuals with ASD than between neurotypical individuals. Past work has often failed to generalize, because of small sample sizes, unquantified data quality, and analytic flexibility. This study addressed these limitations while testing the above three hypotheses, applied to amygdala functional connectivity.

Atypical gaze patterns in autistic adults are heterogeneous across but reliable within individuals.

Background: Across behavioral studies, autistic individuals show greater variability than typically developing individuals. However, it remains unknown to what extent this variability arises from heterogeneity across individuals, or from unreliability within individuals. Here, we focus on eye tracking, which provides rich dependent measures that have been used extensively in studies of autism.

Caltech Conte Center, a multimodal data resource for exploring social cognition and decision-making.

This data release of 117 healthy community-dwelling adults provides multimodal high-quality neuroimaging and behavioral data for the investigation of brain-behavior relationships. We provide structural MRI, resting-state functional MRI, movie functional MRI, together with questionnaire-based and task-based psychological variables; many of the participants have multiple datasets from retesting over the course of several years. Our dataset is distinguished by utilizing open-source data formats and processing tools (BIDS, FreeSurfer, fMRIPrep, MRIQC), providing data that is thoroughly quality checked, preprocessed to various extents and available in multiple anatomical spaces.

Video-evoked fMRI BOLD responses are highly consistent across different data acquisition sites.

Naturalistic imaging paradigms, in which participants view complex videos in the scanner, are increasingly used in human cognitive neuroscience. Videos evoke temporally synchronized brain responses that are similar across subjects as well as within subjects, but the reproducibility of these brain responses across different data acquisition sites has not yet been quantified. Here, we characterize the consistency of brain responses across independent samples of participants viewing the same videos in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners at different sites (Indiana University and Caltech).

Reorganization of the Social Brain in Individuals with Only One Intact Cerebral Hemisphere.

Social cognition and emotion are ubiquitous human processes that recruit a reliable set of brain networks in healthy individuals. These brain networks typically comprise midline (e.g.

Increased hippocampal shape asymmetry and volumetric ventricular asymmetry in autism spectrum disorder.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a prevalent and fast-growing pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder worldwide. Despite the increasing prevalence of ASD and the breadth of research conducted on the disorder, a conclusive etiology has yet to be established and controversy still exists surrounding the anatomical abnormalities in ASD. In particular, structural asymmetries have seldom been investigated in ASD, especially in subcortical regions.

Intrinsic Functional Connectivity of the Brain in Adults with a Single Cerebral Hemisphere.

A reliable set of functional brain networks is found in healthy people and thought to underlie our cognition, emotion, and behavior. Here, we investigated these networks by quantifying intrinsic functional connectivity in six individuals who had undergone surgical removal of one hemisphere. Hemispherectomy subjects and healthy controls were scanned with identical parameters on the same scanner and compared to a large normative sample (n = 1,482).

Cortical responses to dynamic emotional facial expressions generalize across stimuli, and are sensitive to task-relevance, in adults with and without Autism.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) report difficulties extracting meaningful information from dynamic and complex social cues, like facial expressions. The nature and mechanisms of these difficulties remain unclear. Here we tested whether that difficulty can be traced to the pattern of activity in "social brain" regions, when viewing dynamic facial expressions.

The social neuroscience of mentalizing: challenges and recommendations.

Our ability to understand and think about the mental states of other people is referred to as 'mentalizing' or 'theory of mind'. It features prominently in all social behavior, is essential for maintaining relationships, and shows pronounced individual differences. Here we review new approaches to study the underlying psychological mechanisms and discuss how they could best be investigated using modern tools from social neuroscience.

Directed network discovery with dynamic network modelling.

Cognitive tasks recruit multiple brain regions. Understanding how these regions influence each other (the network structure) is an important step to characterize the neural basis of cognitive processes. Often, limited evidence is available to restrict the range of hypotheses a priori, and techniques that sift efficiently through a large number of possible network structures are needed (network discovery).

Decoding task and stimulus representations in face-responsive cortex.

Observers can deliberately attend to some aspects of a face (e.g. emotional expression) while ignoring others.

Emotional prosody processing in autism spectrum disorder.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are characterized by severe deficits in social communication, whereby the nature of their impairments in emotional prosody processing have yet to be specified. Here, we investigated emotional prosody processing in individuals with ASD and controls with novel, lifelike behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms. Compared to controls, individuals with ASD showed reduced emotional prosody recognition accuracy on a behavioral task.

The role of the amygdala in naturalistic mentalising in typical development and in autism spectrum disorder.

Background: The substantial discrepancy between mentalising in experimental settings v. real-life social interactions hinders the understanding of the neural basis of real-life social cognition and of social impairments in psychiatric disorders.

Aims: To determine the neural mechanisms underlying naturalistic mentalising in individuals with and without autism spectrum disorder.

Training-induced plasticity of the social brain in autism spectrum disorder.

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is linked to social brain activity and facial affect recognition (FAR).

Aims: To examine social brain plasticity in ASD.

Method: Using FAR tests and functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks for FAR, we compared 32 individuals with ASD and 25 controls.

Approximating implicit and explicit mentalizing with two naturalistic video-based tasks in typical development and autism spectrum disorder.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been proposed to show greater impairments in implicit than explicit mentalizing. To test this proposition, we developed two comparable naturalistic tasks for a performance-based approximation of implicit and explicit mentalizing in 28 individuals with ASD and 23 matched typically developed (TD) participants. Although both tasks were sensitive to the social impairments of individuals with ASD, implicit mentalizing was not more dysfunctional than explicit mentalizing.

Face puzzle-two new video-based tasks for measuring explicit and implicit aspects of facial emotion recognition.

Recognizing others' emotional states is crucial for effective social interaction. While most facial emotion recognition tasks use explicit prompts that trigger consciously controlled processing, emotional faces are almost exclusively processed implicitly in real life. Recent attempts in social cognition suggest a dual process perspective, whereby explicit and implicit processes largely operate independently.

The role of the amygdala in atypical gaze on emotional faces in autism spectrum disorders.

Reduced focus toward the eyes is a characteristic of atypical gaze on emotional faces in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Along with the atypical gaze, aberrant amygdala activity during face processing compared with neurotypically developed (NT) participants has been repeatedly reported in ASD. It remains unclear whether the previously reported dysfunctional amygdalar response patterns in ASD support an active avoidance of direct eye contact or rather a lack of social attention.

Conceptualizing emotions along the dimensions of valence, arousal, and communicative frequency - implications for social-cognitive tests and training tools.

Background And Objectives: Emotion words are mostly characterized along the classic dimensions of arousal and valence. In the current study we sought to complement this characterization by investigating the frequency of emotions in human everyday communication, which may be crucial information for designing new diagnostic or intervention tools to test and improve emotion recognition.

Methods: One hundred healthy German individuals were asked to indicate the valence and arousal of 62 emotion words in a questionnaire.

Atypical reflexive gaze patterns on emotional faces in autism spectrum disorders.

Atypical scan paths on emotional faces and reduced eye contact represent a prominent feature of autism symptomatology, yet the reason for these abnormalities remains a puzzle. Do individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) fail to orient toward the eyes or do they actively avoid direct eye contact? Here, we used a new task to investigate reflexive eye movements on fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Participants (ASDs: 12; controls: 11) initially fixated either on the eyes or on the mouth.

Cooperation and heterogeneity of the autistic mind.

Individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) have a core difficulty in recursively inferring the intentions of others. The precise cognitive dysfunctions that determine the heterogeneity at the heart of this spectrum, however, remains unclear. Furthermore, it remains possible that impairment in social interaction is not a fundamental deficit but a reflection of deficits in distinct cognitive processes.

The influence of prior record on moral judgment.

Repeat offenders are commonly given more severe sentences than first-time offenders for the same violations. Though this practice makes intuitive sense, the theory behind escalating penalties is disputed in both legal and economic theories. Here we investigate folk intuitions concerning the moral and intentional status of actions performed by people with positive versus negative prior records.