Searching for Neuroimaging Targets for Interventions in ASD

Background: As humans, we are constantly engaging in social cognition, using cues from facial expressions, gaze shifts, and body movements to infer the intentions of others, predict their actions, and plan our own actions accordingly. Considerable advances have been made in the past 20 years in the fields of cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience in identifying neural-circuit-level mechanisms of dysfunction in ASD. 

Objectives: In this talk, I will describe my laboratory’s research using neuroimaging techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electrophysiology (EEG), and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to chart the development of brain mechanisms for social cognition in typically developing children and adolescents.

Methods: Our work has served to characterize the functional properties and development, from infancy to adulthood of a set network of interacting, distributed neuroanatomical structures dedicated to processing social meaning. In particular, I will focus on our work describing the identification of neuroimaging biomarkers for emotion regulation and the perception of biological motion.

Results: With this understanding of the typical development of the neural basis of social cognition as a backdrop, I will describe our efforts to utilize these candidate biomarkers in a developmental experimental therapeutics approach to using social neuroscience findings in the developmental and evaluation of behavioral and pharmacological treatments for autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders.

Conclusions: Availability of well-studied neuroimaging tasks that reliably engage neural circuitry of social functioning in typically developing children and in children with ASD is a prerequisite for deploying experimental-therapeutics approaches aimed at discovering novel interventions for ASD .