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Description
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit deficits in socio-communicative behaviors, including face perception. Face perception deficits in ASD include, but are not limited to, avoidance of looking at faces, reduced sensitivity to emotional expression in faces, and impairment in face recognition and discrimination. Given the importance of face perception to social interactions, a core domain of impairment in ASD, this study examined intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) of the core face perception system, a collection of brain regions preferentially activated in response to faces, in children and adolescents with ASD. Resting-state fMRI data were available for 50 children and adolescents with ASD between 7 and 17 years old and 50 typical developing children and adolescents matched on age, gender, handedness, non-verbal IQ, and in-scanner head motion. These data underwent a standard fMRI preprocessing pipeline, including slice-time and motion correction, field-map correction, bandpass filtering, and removal of nuisance regressors. Whole-brain iFC of the core face perception system was examined with bilateral fusiform face area (FFA), occipital face area, and posterior superior temporal sulcus as seeds. Pearson's correlation and canonical correlation analysis were employed to examine the clinical relevance of between-group (ASD vs. TD) iFC differences. Relative to the typically developing control group, participants with ASD showed overconnectivity between rFFA and the default mode network (DMN) as well as underconnectivity between rFFA and the salience network (SN). An anticorrelation between the degree of overconnectivity between rFFA and DMN and the degree of underconnectivity between rFFA and SN was also identified, indicating that the observed rFFA-DMN overconnectivity was accompanied by rFFA-SN underconnectivity. The degree of rFFA-SN underconnectivity was linked to ASD social communication symptoms, suggesting that reduced communication between face perception regions and SN may be linked to inefficient propagation of facial information when faces are perceived, contributing to social communication deficits in ASD. In summary, the present study shows that in ASD the core face perception system is atypically connected with the SN, suggesting that faces may be less salient for children and adolescents with ASD and the reduced subjective salience of faces may be linked to ASD social communication impairments
