FP7 Outputs
Published February 22, 2020 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project

Creators

  • 1. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim / University of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany
  • 2. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim / University of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany
  • 3. Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK
  • 4. Neurospin Centre CEA, Saclay, Gif sur Yvette, France
  • 5. Department of Psychiatry, UMC Utrecht Brain Center, Utrecht, The Netherlands
  • 6. Autism Research Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
  • 7. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
  • 8. Center of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (KIND), Centre for Psychiatry Research, Department of Women's and Children's Health, Karolinska Institutet and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Stockholm Health Care Services, Stockholm County Council, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 9. Department of Forensic and Neurodevelopmental Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK
  • 10. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Frankfurt am Main, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany
  • 11. Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
  • 12. Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry Unit, "Gaetano Martino" University Hospital, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
  • 13. Roche Pharmaceutical Research and Early Development, NORD Discovery and Translational Area, Roche Innovation Center Basel, Basel, Switzerland

Description

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition with key deficits in social functioning. It is widely assumed that the biological underpinnings of social impairment are neurofunctional alterations in the "social brain," a neural circuitry involved in inferring the mental state of a social partner. However, previous evidence comes from small-scale studies and findings have been mixed. We therefore carried out the to-date largest study on neural correlates of mentalizing in ASD.

Methods: As part of the Longitudinal European Autism Project, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging at six European sites in a large, well-powered, and deeply phenotyped sample of individuals with ASD (N = 205) and typically developing (TD) individuals (N = 189) aged 6 to 30 years. We presented an animated shapes task to assess and comprehensively characterize social brain activation during mentalizing. We tested for effects of age, diagnosis, and their association with symptom measures, including a continuous measure of autistic traits.

Results: We observed robust effects of task. Within the ASD sample, autistic traits were moderately associated with functional activation in one of the key regions of the social brain, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. However, there were no significant effects of diagnosis on task performance and no effects of age and diagnosis on social brain responses. Besides a lack of mean group differences, our data provide no evidence for meaningful differences in the distribution of brain response measures. Extensive control analyses suggest that the lack of case-control differences was not due to a variety of potential confounders.

Conclusions: Contrary to prior reports, this large-scale study does not support the assumption that altered social brain activation during mentalizing forms a common neural marker of ASD, at least with the paradigm we employed. Yet, autistic individuals show socio-behavioral deficits. Our work therefore highlights the need to interrogate social brain function with other brain measures, such as connectivity and network-based approaches, using other paradigms, or applying complementary analysis approaches to assess individual differences in this heterogeneous condition.

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Additional details

Funding

IMAGEMEND – IMAging GEnetics for MENtal Disorders 602450
European Commission
AGGRESSOTYPE – Aggression subtyping for improved insight and treatment innovation in psychiatric disorders 602805
European Commission