Kennedy Daniel P, Courchesne Eric
Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0662, USA.
Neuroimage. 2008 Feb 15;39(4):1877-85. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.10.052. Epub 2007 Nov 12.
In higher functioning individuals with autism, a striking disparity exists between impaired social and emotional abilities and relatively preserved sustained attention and goal-directed cognitive abilities. As these two functional domains appear to map onto two distinct large-scale brain networks, the Task-Negative Network and the Task-Positive Network, respectively, we examined their intrinsically defined functional organization in individuals with autism. Using resting functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI), we found that, in autism, there was altered functional organization of the network involved in social and emotional processing, but no group difference in the functional organization of the network involved in sustained attention and goal-directed cognition. We suggest that these findings might serve to relate the seemingly disparate strengths and weaknesses of the autistic behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive phenotype into a tractable neurofunctional framework. These results also highlight the usefulness of resting fcMRI for studying the brain in neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.
在高功能自闭症个体中，社交和情感能力受损与相对保留的持续注意力和目标导向认知能力之间存在显著差异。由于这两个功能领域似乎分别映射到两个不同的大规模脑网络，即任务负性网络和任务正性网络，我们研究了自闭症个体中它们内在定义的功能组织。使用静息功能连接磁共振成像（fcMRI），我们发现，在自闭症中，参与社交和情感处理的网络功能组织发生了改变，但在参与持续注意力和目标导向认知的网络功能组织方面没有组间差异。我们认为，这些发现可能有助于将自闭症行为、感知和认知表型中看似不同的优势和劣势关联到一个易于处理的神经功能框架中。这些结果还凸显了静息fcMRI在研究神经精神和神经发育障碍中的大脑方面的有用性。
