Cognitive Psychology seminars

To date, neuroimaging research has had a limited focus on non-social features of autism. As a result, neurobiological explanations for atypical sensory perception in autism are lacking. To address this, we quantitively condensed findings from the non-social autism fMRI literature in line with the current best practices for neuroimaging meta-analyses. Using activation likelihood estimation (ALE), we conducted a series of robust meta-analyses across 83 experiments from 52 fMRI studies investigating differences between autistic (n = 891) and typical (n = 967) participants. We found that typical controls, compared to autistic people, show greater activity in the prefrontal cortex (BA9, BA10) during perception tasks. More refined analyses revealed that, when compared to typical controls, autistic people show greater recruitment of the extrastriate V2 cortex (BA18) during visual processing. Taken together, these findings contribute to our understanding of current theories of autistic perception, and highlight some of the challenges of cognitive neuroscience research in autism.

In many ways, cognitive neuroscience is the attempt to use physiological observation to clarify the mechanisms that shape behavior. Over the past 25 years, fMRI has provided a system-wide and yet somewhat spatially precise view of the response in human cortex evoked by a wide variety of stimuli and task contexts. The current talk focuses on the other direction of inference; the implications of this observed functional organization for behavior. To begin, we must interrogate the methodological and empirical frameworks underlying our derivation of this organization, partially by exploring its relationship to and predictability from gross neuroanatomy. Next, across a series of studies, the implications of two properties of functional organization for behavior will be explored: 1) the co-localization of visual working memory and perceptual processing and 2) implicit learning in the context of distributed responses. In sum, these results highlight the limitations of our current approach and hint at a new general mechanism for explaining observed behavior in context with the neural substrate.