Neural Basis of Self and Other Representation in Autism: An fMRI Study of Self-Face Recognition

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 3; no. 10; p. e3526
• Main Authors: Uddin, Lucina Q., Davies, Mari S., Scott, Ashley A., Zaidel, Eran, Bookheimer, Susan Y., Iacoboni, Marco, Dapretto, Mirella
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 29.10.2008; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adults; Age; Autism; Autistic Disorder - physiopathology; Autistic Disorder - psychology; Behavior; Behavior - physiology; Biometry; Brain; Brain mapping; Brain Mapping - methods; Child; Children; Children & youth; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive ability; Developmental disabilities; Dissociation; Empathy; Face; Face recognition; Facial Expression; Facial recognition technology; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Humans; Interpersonal relations; Judgments; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Male; Medicine; Mental Processes - physiology; Neural networks; Neuroscience/Cognitive Neuroscience; Neuroscience/Neurodevelopment; Neuroscience/Psychology; Neurosciences; Pattern recognition; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Photic Stimulation; Psychiatry; Representations; Self Concept; Social aspects; Social behavior; Social factors; Social interactions; Social Perception; Studies; Trends; Los Angeles California; United States > US; California
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003526
• ISSN: 1932-6203

Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by decreased interest and engagement in social interactions and by enhanced self-focus. While previous theoretical approaches to understanding autism have emphasized social impairments and altered interpersonal interactions, there is a recent shift towards understanding the nature of the representation of the self in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Still, the neural mechanisms subserving self-representations in ASD are relatively unexplored. We used event-related fMRI to investigate brain responsiveness to images of the subjects' own face and to faces of others. Children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children viewed randomly presented digital morphs between their own face and a gender-matched other face, and made "self/other" judgments. Both groups of children activated a right premotor/prefrontal system when identifying images containing a greater percentage of the self face. However, while TD children showed activation of this system during both self- and other-processing, children with ASD only recruited this system while viewing images containing mostly their own face. This functional dissociation between the representation of self versus others points to a potential neural substrate for the characteristic self-focus and decreased social understanding exhibited by these individuals, and suggests that individuals with ASD lack the shared neural representations for self and others that TD children and adults possess and may use to understand others.