Individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS) commonly display characteristics of social anxiety, including gaze aversion, increased time to initiate social interaction, and difficulty forming meaningful peer relationships. While neural correlates of face processing, an important component of social interaction, are altered in FXS, studies have not examined whether social anxiety in this population is related to higher cognitive processes, such as memory. This study aimed to determine whether the neural circuitry involved in face encoding was disrupted in individuals with FXS, and whether brain activity during face encoding was related to levels of social anxiety. A group of 11 individuals with FXS (5 M) and 11 age- and gender-matched control participants underwent fMRI scanning while performing a face encoding task with online eye-tracking. Results indicate that compared to the control group, individuals with FXS exhibited decreased activation of prefrontal regions associated with complex social cognition, including the medial and superior frontal cortex, during successful face encoding. Further, the FXS and control groups showed significantly different relationships between measures of social anxiety (including gaze-fixation) and brain activity during face encoding. These data indicate that social anxiety in FXS may be related to the inability to successfully recruit higher level social cognition regions during the initial phases of memory formation.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598775PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.08.009DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

face encoding
24
social anxiety
24
social cognition
12
individuals fxs
12
social
10
fragile syndrome
8
anxiety including
8
social interaction
8
brain activity
8
activity face
8

Similar Publications

Immaturities exist at multiple levels of the developing human visual pathway, starting with immaturities in photon efficiency and spatial sampling in the retina and on through immaturities in early and later stages of cortical processing. Here we use Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) and controlled visual stimuli to determine the degree to which sensitivity to horizontal retinal disparity is limited by the visibility of the monocular half-images, the ability to encode absolute disparity or the ability to encode relative disparity. Responses were recorded from male and female human participants at average ages of 5.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Microbiota awareness levels of medical students: the case of Trakya university.

BMC Med Educ

January 2025

Faculty of Medicine, Department of Public Health, Trakya University, Edirne, Türkiye.

Background: Human microbiota is noteworthy for its ability to encode a much greater variety and quantity of proteins than human cells. Despite its dynamic and complex nature, it has been associated with healthy living for over a century. The knowledge and attitudes of healthcare professionals, especially physicians, influence the use of pro-prebiotic interventions to modulate the microbiota.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequence compressors for novel species frequently face challenges when processing wide-scale raw, FASTA, or multi-FASTA structured data. For years, molecular sequence databases have favored the widely used general-purpose Gzip and Zstd compressors. The absence of sequence-specific characteristics in these encoders results in subpar performance, and their use depends on time-consuming parameter adjustments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show abnormal speech prosody. Tonal languages can pose more difficulties as speakers need to use acoustic cues to make lexical contrasts while encoding the focal function, but the acquisition of speech prosody of non-native languages, especially tonal languages has rarely been investigated.

Methods: This study aims to fill in the aforementioned gap by studying prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin by native Cantonese-speaking children with ASD (n = 25), in comparison with their typically developing (TD) peers (n = 20) and native Mandarin-speaking children (n = 20).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Diverse retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) transmit distinct visual features from the eye to the brain. Recent studies have categorized RGCs into 45 types in mice based on transcriptomic profiles, showing strong alignment with morphological and electrophysiological properties. However, little is known about how these types are spatially arranged on the two-dimensional retinal surface-an organization that influences visual encoding-and how their local microenvironments impact development and neurodegenerative responses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!