1. Sex differences and autism: brain function during verbal fluency and mental rotation
- Author
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Beacher, Felix D. C. C., Radulescu, Eugenia, Minati, L., Baron-Cohen, Simon, Lombardo, Michael V., Lai, Meng-Chuan, Walker, Anne, Howard, Dawn, Gray, Marcus A., Harrison, Neil A., Critchley, Hugo D., and Lombardo, Michael V. [0000-0001-6780-8619]
- Subjects
Male ,Audiology ,Neuropsychological Tests ,Social and Behavioral Sciences ,Mental rotation ,0302 clinical medicine ,Sociology ,Image Processing, Computer-Assisted ,Verbal fluency test ,Psychology ,Asperger Syndrome ,10. No inequality ,Psychiatry ,Sex Characteristics ,Multidisciplinary ,medicine.diagnostic_test ,05 social sciences ,fMRI ,Brain ,Cognition ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Clinical Psychology ,Mental Health ,Medicine ,Female ,Sex characteristics ,Research Article ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Science ,Neuroimaging ,Neuropsychiatric Disorders ,Biology ,behavioral disciplines and activities ,050105 experimental psychology ,Sexual and Gender Issues ,03 medical and health sciences ,Neuropsychology ,medicine ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Verbal Behavior ,medicine.disease ,Asperger syndrome ,Space Perception ,Developmental Psychology ,RC0321 ,Autism ,Functional magnetic resonance imaging ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Neuroscience - Abstract
Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) affect more males than females. This suggests that the neurobiology of autism: 1) may overlap with mechanisms underlying typical sex-differentiation or 2) alternately reflect sex-specificity in how autism is expressed in males and females. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test these alternate hypotheses. Fifteen men and fourteen women with Asperger syndrome (AS), and sixteen typically developing men and sixteen typically developing women underwent fMRI during performance of mental rotation and verbal fluency tasks. All groups performed the tasks equally well. On the verbal fluency task, despite equivalent task-performance, both males and females with AS showed enhanced activation of left occipitoparietal and inferior prefrontal activity compared to controls. During mental rotation, there was a significant diagnosis-by-sex interaction across occipital, temporal, parietal, middle frontal regions, with greater activation in AS males and typical females compared to AS females and typical males. These findings suggest a complex relationship between autism and sex that is differentially expressed in verbal and visuospatial domains. © 2012 Beacher et al. 7 6 Cited By :28; Export Date: 17 July 2017
- Published
- 2012