Neural processing of facial identity and expression in adults with and without autism: A multi-method approach.

The ability to recognize faces and facial expressions is a common human talent. It has, however, been suggested to be impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The goal of this study was to compare the processing of facial identity and emotion between individuals with ASD and neurotypicals (NTs).

Adults with high functioning autism display idiosyncratic behavioral patterns, neural representations and connectivity of the 'Voice Area' while judging the appropriateness of emotional vocal reactions.

Understanding others in everyday situations requires multiple types of information processing (visual, auditory, higher order…) which implicates the use of multiple neural circuits of the human brain. Here, using a multisensory paradigm we investigate one aspect of social understanding less explored in the literature: instead of focusing on the capacity to infer what a specific person is thinking, we explore here how people with high functioning autism (HFA) and matched controls with typical development (TD) infer the "population thinking". For this we created an audio-visual 'social norm inference' task.

Neural Representations Behind 'Social Norm' Inferences In Humans.

Humans are highly skilled in social reasoning, e.g., inferring thoughts of others.

A Multitude of Neural Representations Behind Multisensory "Social Norm" Processing.

Humans show a unique capacity to process complex information from multiple sources. Social perception in natural environment provides a good example of such capacity as it typically requires the integration of information from different sensory systems, and also from different levels of sensory processing. Here, instead of studying one isolate system and level of representation, we focused upon a neuroimaging paradigm which allows to capture multiple brain representations simultaneously, i.

The Effect of Spatial Smoothing on Representational Similarity in a Simple Motor Paradigm.

Multi-voxel pattern analyses (MVPA) are often performed on unsmoothed data, which is very different from the general practice of large smoothing extents in standard voxel-based analyses. In this report, we studied the effect of smoothing on MVPA results in a motor paradigm. Subjects pressed four buttons with two different fingers of the two hands in response to auditory commands.