Abstract
Reluctance to make eye contact during natural interactions is a central diagnostic criterion for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the underlying neural correlates for eye contacts in ASD are unknown, and diagnostic biomarkers are active areas of research. Here, neuroimaging, eye tracking, and pupillometry data were acquired simultaneously using two-person functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during live «in-person» eye contact and looking at a video face for typically-developed (TD) and ASD participants to identify neural correlates of live eye contact in both groups.
Comparisons between ASD and TD showed decreased right dorsal-parietal activity and increased right ventral temporal-parietal activity for ASD during live eye contact (p≤0.05, corrected for FDR) and reduced brain-to-brain coherence consistent with atypical neural systems for live eye contact.Hypoactivity of the right dorso-parietal regions during eye contact in ASD was further associated with gold standard measures of social performance by correlating neural responses and individual measures of: ADOS-2, Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd Edition (r = -0.76, -0.92 and -0.77); and SRS-2, Social Responsiveness Scale, Second Edition (r = -0.58).
The findings indicate that as categorized social ability decreases, neural responses to actual eye contact in the right dorsal parietal region also decrease according to a neural correlate for social characteristics in ASD.
To.Examples of average positions of participants’ gaze when viewing the face of the lab partner. The red box illustrates the «eye box» of the target and the red to green color gradient indicates the percentage of «target hits» in the eye box during a full run. B.Arrangement of the fNIRS channel. The right and left hemispheres of a single rendered brain illustrate the median locations (blue dots) for 58 channels per participant. The coordinates of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) were determined for each channel by digitizing the transmitter and detector locations relative to the previous fiduciary markers, posterior, dorsal and lateral based on the standard system 10–20.
Source — https://www.intramed.net/102586