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Hintergrund und Stand (inter)nationaler Forschung: Eine Autismus-Spektrum-Störung (ASS) persistiert über die gesamte Lebensspanne und geht häufig mit substantiellen Unterstützungsbedarfen einher. Aufgrund massiver Barrieren in der Versorgung von Erwachsenen mit ASS sind Angehörige [zum vollständigen Text gelangen Sie über die oben angegebene URL]

Frontiers in psychology 10, 1913 (2019). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01913, Published by Frontiers Research Foundation, Lausanne

Behavioral research has revealed deficits in the development of joint attention (JA) as one of the earliest signs of autism. While the neural basis of JA has been studied predominantly in adults, we recently demonstrated a protracted development of the brain networks supporting JA in typically developing children and adolescents. The present eye-tracking/fMRI study now extends these findings to adolescents with autism. Our results show that in adolescents with autism JA is subserved by abnormal activation patterns in brain areas related to social cognition abnormalities which are at the core of ASD including the STS and TPJ, despite behavioral maturation with no behavioral differences. Furthermore, in the autism group we observed increased neural activity in a network of social and emotional processing areas during interactions with their mother. Moreover, data indicated that less severely affected individuals with autism showed higher frontal activation associated with self-initiated interactions. Taken together, this study provides first-time data of JA in children/adolescents with autism incorporating the interactive character of JA, its reciprocity and motivational aspects. The observed functional differences in adolescents ASD suggest that persistent developmental differences in the neural processes underlying JA contribute to social interaction difficulties in ASD., NeuroImage: Clinical, 14, ISSN:2213-1582

Theories of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have focused on altered perceptual integration\ud of sensory features as a possible core deficit. Yet, there is little understanding of the\ud neuronal processing of elementary sensory features in ASD. For typically developed individuals,\ud we previously established a direct link between frequency-specific neural activity\ud and the intensity of a specific sensory feature: Gamma-band activity in the visual cortex\ud increased approximately linearly with the strength of visual motion. Using magnetoencephalography\ud (MEG), we investigated whether in individuals with ASD neural activity reflect the\ud coherence, and thus intensity, of visual motion in a similar fashion. Thirteen adult participants\ud with ASD and 14 control participants performed a motion direction discrimination task\ud with increasing levels of motion coherence. A polynomial regression analysis revealed that\ud gamma-band power increased significantly stronger with motion coherence in ASD compared\ud to controls, suggesting excessive visual activation with increasing stimulus intensity\ud originating from motion-responsive visual areas V3, V6 and hMT/V5. Enhanced neural\ud responses with increasing stimulus intensity suggest an enhanced response gain in ASD.\ud Response gain is controlled by excitatory-inhibitory interactions, which also drive high-frequency\ud oscillations in the gamma-band. Thus, our data suggest that a disturbed excitatoryinhibitory\ud balance underlies enhanced neural responses to coherent motion in ASD.

Perceiving someone else's gaze shift toward an object can influence how this object will be manipulated by the observer, suggesting a modulatory effect of a gaze-based social context on action control. High-functioning autism (HFA) is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which may be associated with an inability to automatically integrate socially relevant nonverbal cues when generating actions. To explore these hypotheses, we made use of a stimulus-response compatibility paradigm in which a comparison group and patients with HFA were asked to generate spatially congruent or incongruent motor responses to changes in a face, a face-like and an object stimulus. Results demonstrate that while in the comparison group being looked at by a virtual other leads to a reduction of reaction time costs associated with generating a spatially incongruent response, this effect is not present in the HFA group. We suggest that this modulatory effect of social gaze on action control might play an important role in direct social interactions by helping to coordinate one's actions with those of someone else. Future research should focus on these implicit mechanisms of interpersonal alignment ('online' social cognition), which might be at the very heart of the difficulties individuals with autism experience in everyday social encounters.