The Imaginary Part of Coherency in Autism: Differences in Cortical Functional Connectivity in Preschool Children: e75941

Cognition arises from the transient integration and segregation of activity across functionally distinct brain areas. Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which encompass a wide range of developmental disabilities, have been presumed to be associated with a problem in cortical and sub-cortical dynamics...

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Veröffentlicht in:PloS one 2013-10, Vol.8 (10)
Hauptverfasser: Dominguez, Luis Garcia, Stieben, Jim, Velazquez, Jose LuisPerez, Shanker, Stuart
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Cognition arises from the transient integration and segregation of activity across functionally distinct brain areas. Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which encompass a wide range of developmental disabilities, have been presumed to be associated with a problem in cortical and sub-cortical dynamics of coordinated activity, often involving enhanced local but decreased long range coordination over areas of integration. In this paper we challenge this idea by presenting results from a relatively large population of ASD children and age-matched controls during a face-processing task. Over most of the explored domain, children with ASD exhibited enhanced synchronization, although finer detail reveals specific enhancement/reduction of synchrony depending on time, frequency and brain site. Our results are derived from the use of the imaginary part of coherency, a measure which is not susceptible to volume conduction artifacts and therefore presents a credible picture of coordinated brain activity. We also present evidence that this measure is a good candidate to provide features in building a classifier to be used as a potential biomarker for autism.
ISSN:1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0075941