Behavioral, fMRI, and Anatomical MRI Investigations of Attention in Autism

描述（由申请人提供）：自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的核心诊断标准是社交互动和沟通方面的缺陷。然而，自闭症的另一方面是它对基本感知的影响：自闭症患者看、听和感觉世界的方式都不同。对ASD患者来说，感知困难的一个方面是忽视干扰——在执行视觉任务时，越来越多（但不是全部）的证据表明，与典型的对照组相比，ASD患者经历了更多来自不相关信息的干扰，在面对干扰时变得更慢、更不准确。注意选择的缺陷可能不仅影响感知，而且可能进一步导致自闭症患者在复杂的现实环境中应对日常认知任务的困难。在本研究中，我们将利用行为心理物理学来确定自闭症患者注意力选择受损的具体阶段。此外，我们将使用功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）和扩散加权成像（DWI）来测试pulvinar和multiple-demand （MD）网络（两个已知支持注意力选择的大脑区域）在ASD中的参与情况。拟进行的实验将解决三个具体问题：1)哪些注意选择功能在ASD中受损，哪些没有受损？2) ASD中大脑注意力网络的哪些部分表现出异常反应？3)在ASD中，包括白质连接在内的注意力区域的解剖结构是否被破坏了？这些问题的答案将促进我们对自闭症谱系障碍的认知和神经表型的理解，同时也有助于我们对典型个体的视觉注意及其大脑基础的理解。拟议研究的更广泛目标是培养研究自闭症受试者的新专业知识，以及结构成像研究（包括形态测量学和扩散加权成像）的设计、分析和解释。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The core diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are deficits in social interactions and communication. Another side to autism, though, is its impact on basic perception: people with ASD see, hear, and feel the world differently. One aspect of perception that poses difficulty for people with ASD is ignoring distractions - when performing visual tasks, increasing (but not all) evidence suggests that subjects with ASD experience more interference from irrelevant information than typical controls, becoming slower and less accurate in the face of distraction. A deficit in attentional selection might not only affect perception, but might further underlie the difficulties that individuals with ASD have in coping with everyday cognitive tasks in complex real-world environments. In the proposed research, we will pinpoint the specific stage(s) of attentional selection that are impaired in ASD using behavioral psychophysics. Further, we will test the involvement of the pulvinar and multiple-demand (MD) network, two brain regions known to support attentional selection, in ASD using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI). The proposed experiments will address three specific questions: 1) Which attentional selection functions are impaired in ASD, and which are spared? 2) Which parts of the brain's attentional network show abnormal responses in ASD? 3) Is the anatomy of attentional areas, including their white matter connections, disrupted in ASD? The answers to these questions will advance our understanding of the cognitive and neural phenotype of ASD, and at the same time inform our understanding of visual attention and its brain basis in typical individuals. The broader objective of the proposed studies is to cultivate new expertise in studying subjects with autism, and in the design, analysis, and interpretation of structural imaging studies (including both morphometry and diffusion- weighted imaging).