Adolphs R, Sears L, Piven J
Department of Neurology, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 52242, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2001 Feb 15;13(2):232-40. doi: 10.1162/089892901564289.
Autism has been thought to be characterized, in part, by dysfunction in emotional and social cognition, but the pathology of the underlying processes and their neural substrates remain poorly understood. Several studies have hypothesized that abnormal amygdala function may account for some of the impairments seen in autism, specifically, impaired recognition of socially relevant information from faces. We explored this issue in eight high-functioning subjects with autism in four experiments that assessed recognition of emotional and social information, primarily from faces. All tasks used were identical to those previously used in studies of subjects with bilateral amygdala damage, permitting direct comparisons. All subjects with autism made abnormal social judgments regarding the trustworthiness of faces; however, all were able to make normal social judgments from lexical stimuli, and all had a normal ability to perceptually discriminate the stimuli. Overall, these data from subjects with autism show some parallels to those from neurological subjects with focal amygdala damage. We suggest that amygdala dysfunction in autism might contribute to an impaired ability to link visual perception of socially relevant stimuli with retrieval of social knowledge and with elicitation of social behavior.
自闭症被认为部分特征在于情感和社会认知功能障碍，但潜在过程及其神经基质的病理学仍知之甚少。几项研究推测，杏仁核功能异常可能是自闭症中出现的一些损伤的原因，特别是从面部识别社会相关信息的能力受损。我们在8名高功能自闭症患者中进行了四项实验来探讨这个问题，这些实验主要评估了对情感和社会信息的识别，主要来自面部。所有使用的任务都与之前对双侧杏仁核损伤患者的研究中使用的任务相同，以便进行直接比较。所有自闭症患者对面部的可信度都做出了异常的社会判断；然而，所有人都能够根据词汇刺激做出正常的社会判断，并且所有人都具有正常的感知辨别刺激的能力。总体而言，这些来自自闭症患者的数据与来自局灶性杏仁核损伤的神经学患者的数据有一些相似之处。我们认为，自闭症中的杏仁核功能障碍可能导致将社会相关刺激的视觉感知与社会知识的检索以及社会行为的引发联系起来的能力受损。
