Altered Medial Frontal and Superior Temporal Response to Implicit Processing of Emotions in Autism.

Interpreting emotional expressions appropriately poses a challenge for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In particular, difficulties with emotional processing in ASD are more pronounced in contexts where emotional expressions are subtle, automatic, and reflexive-that is, implicit. In contrast, explicit emotional processing, which requires the cognitive evaluation of an emotional experience, appears to be relatively intact in individuals with ASD.

Enhanced parietal cortex activation during location detection in children with autism.

Background: Visuospatial processing has been found to be mediated primarily by two cortical routes, one of which is unique to recognizing objects (occipital-temporal, ventral or "what" pathway) and the other to detecting the location of objects in space (parietal-occipital, dorsal or "where" pathway). Considering previous findings of relative advantage in people with autism in visuospatial processing, this functional MRI study examined the connectivity in the dorsal and ventral pathways in high-functioning children with autism.

Methods: Seventeen high-functioning children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 19 age-and-IQ-matched typically developing (TD) participants took part in this study.