TY - JOUR
T1 - Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort
T2 - the Longitudinal European Autism Project
AU - EU-AIMS LEAP group
AU - Moessnang, Carolin
AU - Baumeister, Sarah
AU - Tillmann, Julian
AU - Goyard, David
AU - Charman, Tony
AU - Ambrosino, Sara
AU - Baron-Cohen, Simon
AU - Beckmann, Christian
AU - Bölte, Sven
AU - Bours, Carsten
AU - Crawley, Daisy
AU - Dell'Acqua, Flavio
AU - Durston, Sarah
AU - Ecker, Christine
AU - Frouin, Vincent
AU - Hayward, Hannah
AU - Holt, Rosemary
AU - Johnson, Mark
AU - Jones, Emily
AU - Lai, Meng-Chuan
AU - Lombardo, Michael V
AU - Mason, Luke
AU - Oldenhinkel, Marianne
AU - Persico, Antonio
AU - Cáceres, Antonia San José
AU - Spooren, Will
AU - Loth, Eva
AU - Murphy, Declan G M
AU - Buitelaar, Jan K
AU - Banaschewski, Tobias
AU - Brandeis, Daniel
AU - Tost, Heike
AU - Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas
PY - 2020/2/22
Y1 - 2020/2/22
N2 - BACKGROUND: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition with key deficits in social functioning. It is widely assumed that the biological underpinnings of social impairment are neurofunctional alterations in the "social brain," a neural circuitry involved in inferring the mental state of a social partner. However, previous evidence comes from small-scale studies and findings have been mixed. We therefore carried out the to-date largest study on neural correlates of mentalizing in ASD.METHODS: As part of the Longitudinal European Autism Project, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging at six European sites in a large, well-powered, and deeply phenotyped sample of individuals with ASD (N = 205) and typically developing (TD) individuals (N = 189) aged 6 to 30 years. We presented an animated shapes task to assess and comprehensively characterize social brain activation during mentalizing. We tested for effects of age, diagnosis, and their association with symptom measures, including a continuous measure of autistic traits.RESULTS: We observed robust effects of task. Within the ASD sample, autistic traits were moderately associated with functional activation in one of the key regions of the social brain, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. However, there were no significant effects of diagnosis on task performance and no effects of age and diagnosis on social brain responses. Besides a lack of mean group differences, our data provide no evidence for meaningful differences in the distribution of brain response measures. Extensive control analyses suggest that the lack of case-control differences was not due to a variety of potential confounders.CONCLUSIONS: Contrary to prior reports, this large-scale study does not support the assumption that altered social brain activation during mentalizing forms a common neural marker of ASD, at least with the paradigm we employed. Yet, autistic individuals show socio-behavioral deficits. Our work therefore highlights the need to interrogate social brain function with other brain measures, such as connectivity and network-based approaches, using other paradigms, or applying complementary analysis approaches to assess individual differences in this heterogeneous condition.
AB - BACKGROUND: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition with key deficits in social functioning. It is widely assumed that the biological underpinnings of social impairment are neurofunctional alterations in the "social brain," a neural circuitry involved in inferring the mental state of a social partner. However, previous evidence comes from small-scale studies and findings have been mixed. We therefore carried out the to-date largest study on neural correlates of mentalizing in ASD.METHODS: As part of the Longitudinal European Autism Project, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging at six European sites in a large, well-powered, and deeply phenotyped sample of individuals with ASD (N = 205) and typically developing (TD) individuals (N = 189) aged 6 to 30 years. We presented an animated shapes task to assess and comprehensively characterize social brain activation during mentalizing. We tested for effects of age, diagnosis, and their association with symptom measures, including a continuous measure of autistic traits.RESULTS: We observed robust effects of task. Within the ASD sample, autistic traits were moderately associated with functional activation in one of the key regions of the social brain, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. However, there were no significant effects of diagnosis on task performance and no effects of age and diagnosis on social brain responses. Besides a lack of mean group differences, our data provide no evidence for meaningful differences in the distribution of brain response measures. Extensive control analyses suggest that the lack of case-control differences was not due to a variety of potential confounders.CONCLUSIONS: Contrary to prior reports, this large-scale study does not support the assumption that altered social brain activation during mentalizing forms a common neural marker of ASD, at least with the paradigm we employed. Yet, autistic individuals show socio-behavioral deficits. Our work therefore highlights the need to interrogate social brain function with other brain measures, such as connectivity and network-based approaches, using other paradigms, or applying complementary analysis approaches to assess individual differences in this heterogeneous condition.
KW - Animated shapes
KW - Autism
KW - Autism spectrum disorder
KW - Development
KW - Mentalizing
KW - Multi-site
KW - Social brain
KW - Theory of mind
KW - fMRI
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079736956&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1186/s13229-020-0317-x
DO - 10.1186/s13229-020-0317-x
M3 - Article
C2 - 32087753
SN - 2040-2392
VL - 11
SP - 17
JO - Molecular Autism
JF - Molecular Autism
IS - 1
M1 - 17
ER -