Understanding Autism: Brain connections in infants linked to social interaction
infants with high chances of developing autism showed distinct patterns in brain connections, which researchers said likely emerge much earlier than autism-related behaviours can be noticed. The researchers focussed on the brain's salience network, a group of regions crucial to identifying information in the environment that is worthy of one's attention and enabling appropriate responses to them.
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In babies with high chances of developing autism — a disorder marked by repetitive behaviour and impaired social interaction — the researchers found stronger connections between the salience network and brain regions processing sensory information and movement, or the sensorimotor regions.
The team, co-led by the researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), US, further found that infants with stronger connections to sensorimotor regions in the brain had weaker connections with prefrontal ones, which are important for social interactions.
This suggested that paying more attention to basic sensory information comes at the cost of paying attention to socially relevant cues, thereby possibly playing a role in people with autism displaying an impaired social behaviour, the researchers said.
«An emerging theory in autism research is that differences in sensory processing may precede the more classic social and communication symptoms of autism, and this data supports that theory in showing that very early brain differences related to how
