Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 10010 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037-1099, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2011 Oct;6(5):630-8. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq075. Epub 2010 Aug 27.
Two neurodevelopmental disorders, Williams syndrome (WS) and autism, are both commonly described as having opposite social profiles: social avoidance in autism vs hypersociability in individuals with WS. The goal of this study was to contrast the brain activity associated with language processing in these two populations, in order to understand the very likely interplay between the use of language and the sociability dimension, on which these disorders diverge. Towards this aim, the N400 component of the event-related potentials was used to quantify the processing of semantic integration in these two populations. Results revealed that individuals with WS showed a significantly larger N400 effect, as compared to both typical controls and individuals with autism, while the latter group demonstrated the smallest N400 effect. The findings demonstrate quite opposite profiles of neural correlates of language processing in WS and autism, mirroring their contrasting social phenotypes.
两种神经发育障碍,即威廉姆斯综合征(WS)和自闭症,通常被描述为具有相反的社交特征:自闭症中存在社交回避,而 WS 患者则存在过度社交。本研究的目的是对比这两种人群在语言处理方面相关的大脑活动,以了解语言使用和社交维度之间的相互作用,这两个维度在这些障碍中存在差异。为此,我们使用事件相关电位中的 N400 成分来量化这两种人群的语义整合处理。结果表明,与典型对照组和自闭症患者相比,WS 患者的 N400 效应明显更大,而后者组的 N400 效应最小。这些发现表明,WS 和自闭症患者在语言处理的神经相关方面表现出截然不同的特征,反映了他们在社交表型方面的差异。