Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by reduced attention to salient social stimuli. Here we use two visual oddball tasks to investigate brain systems engaged during attention to social (face) and non-social (scene) stimuli. We focused on the dorsal and ventral subdivisions of the anterior insula (dAI and vAI, respectively), anatomically distinct regions contributing to a 'salience network' that is known to regulate attention to behaviorally meaningful stimuli. Children with ASD performed comparably to their typically developing (TD) peers, but they engaged the right dAI and vAI differently in response to deviant faces compared with deviant scenes. Multivariate activation patterns in the dAI reliably discriminated between children with ASD and TD children with 85% classification accuracy, and children with ASD activated the vAI more than their TD peers. Children with ASD and their TD peers also differed in dAI connectivity patterns to deviant faces, with stronger within-salience network interactions in the ASD group and stronger cross-network interactions in the TD group. Our findings point to atypical patterns of right anterior insula activation and connectivity in ASD and suggest that multiple functions subserved by the insula, including attention and affective processing of salient social stimuli, are aberrant in children with the disorder.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 27 February 2016.
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#11,901,166
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#1,144
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#112,762
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Outputs of similar age from Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience
#24
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Altmetric has tracked 34,364,397 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 64th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,979 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 27.8. This one is in the 41st percentile – i.e., 41% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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