Medical Institute of Developmental Disabilities Research, Showa University, 6-11-11 Kita-Karasuyama, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 157-8577, Japan.
Department of Language Sciences, Graduate School of Humanities, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 1-1 Minami-Osawa, Hachioji-shi, Tokyo 192-0397, Japan.
Cereb Cortex. 2024 Sep 3;34(9). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhae363.
The human auditory system includes discrete cortical patches and selective regions for processing voice information, including emotional prosody. Although behavioral evidence indicates individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in recognizing emotional prosody, it remains understudied whether and how localized voice patches (VPs) and other voice-sensitive regions are functionally altered in processing prosody. This fMRI study investigated neural responses to prosodic voices in 25 adult males with ASD and 33 controls using voices of anger, sadness, and happiness with varying degrees of emotion. We used a functional region-of-interest analysis with an independent voice localizer to identify multiple VPs from combined ASD and control data. We observed a general response reduction to prosodic voices in specific VPs of left posterior temporal VP (TVP) and right middle TVP. Reduced cortical responses in right middle TVP were consistently correlated with the severity of autistic symptoms for all examined emotional prosodies. Moreover, representation similarity analysis revealed the reduced effect of emotional intensity in multivoxel activation patterns in left anterior superior temporal cortex only for sad prosody. These results indicate reduced response magnitudes to voice prosodies in specific TVPs and altered emotion intensity-dependent multivoxel activation patterns in adult ASDs, potentially underlying their socio-communicative difficulties.
人类听觉系统包括离散的皮质斑块和选择性区域，用于处理语音信息，包括情感韵律。尽管行为证据表明，自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者在识别情感韵律方面存在困难，但在处理韵律时，局部语音斑块（VPs）和其他语音敏感区域是否以及如何发生功能改变仍研究不足。这项 fMRI 研究使用不同程度情绪的愤怒、悲伤和快乐语音，调查了 25 名成年男性 ASD 患者和 33 名对照组对韵律语音的神经反应。我们使用了功能感兴趣区域分析和独立的语音定位器，从 ASD 和对照组的综合数据中识别出多个 VP。我们观察到，在左侧后颞 VP（TVP）和右侧中 TVP 的特定 VP 中，对韵律语音的一般反应减少。右侧中 TVP 的皮质反应减少与所有检查的情感韵律的自闭症症状严重程度一致相关。此外，代表相似性分析表明，在左侧前上颞皮质的多体素激活模式中，悲伤韵律的情感强度的影响降低。这些结果表明，在特定的 TVP 中，对语音韵律的反应幅度降低，并且在 ASD 成人中，与情绪强度相关的多体素激活模式发生改变，这可能是他们社交沟通困难的基础。
