Hadjikhani Nouchine, Joseph Robert M, Snyder Josh, Chabris Christopher F, Clark Jill, Steele Shelly, McGrath Lauren, Vangel Mark, Aharon Itzhak, Feczko Eric, Harris Gordon J, Tager-Flusberg Helen
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA.
Neuroimage. 2004 Jul;22(3):1141-50. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.03.025.
Prior imaging studies have failed to show activation of the fusiform gyrus in response to emotionally neutral faces in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [Critchley et al., Brain 124 (2001) 2059; Schultz et al., Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 57 (2000) 331]. However, individuals with ASD do not typically exhibit the striking behavioral deficits that might be expected to result from fusiform gyrus damage, such as those seen in prosopagnosia, and their deficits appear to extend well beyond face identification to include a wide range of impairments in social perceptual processing. In this study, our goal was to further assess the question of whether individuals with ASD have abnormal fusiform gyrus activation to faces. We used high-field (3 T) functional magnetic resonance imaging to study face perception in 11 adult individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 10 normal controls. We used face stimuli, object stimuli, and sensory control stimuli (Fourier scrambled versions of the face and object stimuli) containing a fixation point in the center to ensure that participants were looking at and attending to the images as they were presented. We found that individuals with ASD activated the fusiform face area and other brain areas normally involved in face processing when they viewed faces as compared to non-face stimuli. These data indicate that the face-processing deficits encountered in ASD are not due to a simple dysfunction of the fusiform area, but to more complex anomalies in the distributed network of brain areas involved in social perception and cognition.
先前的影像学研究未能显示出自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者在面对情绪中性面孔时梭状回的激活情况[克里奇利等人，《大脑》124卷（2001年）第2059页；舒尔茨等人，《普通精神病学文献》57卷（2000年）第331页]。然而，ASD患者通常不会表现出因梭状回损伤可能预期出现的显著行为缺陷，比如像面孔失认症中所见的那些缺陷，而且他们的缺陷似乎远远超出面部识别，还包括社会感知加工方面的广泛损伤。在本研究中，我们的目标是进一步评估ASD患者对面孔的梭状回激活是否异常的问题。我们使用高场（3T）功能磁共振成像来研究11名成年自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者和10名正常对照者的面部感知。我们使用面部刺激、物体刺激以及包含中心固定点的感觉控制刺激（面部和物体刺激的傅里叶变换打乱版本），以确保参与者在图像呈现时注视并关注这些图像。我们发现，与非面部刺激相比，ASD患者在观看面孔时激活了梭状面部区域以及其他通常参与面部加工的脑区。这些数据表明，ASD中遇到的面部加工缺陷并非由于梭状回区域的简单功能障碍，而是由于参与社会感知和认知的脑区分布式网络中更复杂的异常情况。
