Autonomic responses of autistic children to people and objects.
Several recent lines of inquiry have pointed to the amygdala as a potential lesion site in autism. Because one function of the amygdala may be to produce autonomic arousal at the sight of a significant face, we compared the responses of autistic children to their mothers' face and to a plain paper cup. Unlike normals, the autistic children as a whole did not show a larger response to the person than to the cup. We also monitored sympathetic activity in autistic children as they engaged in a wide range of everyday behaviours. The children tended to use self-stimulation activities in order to calm hyper-responsive activity of the sympathetic ('fight or flight') branch of the autonomic nervous system. A small percentage of our autistic subjects had hyporesponsive sympathetic activity, with essentially no electrodermal responses except to self-injurious behaviour. We sketch a hypothesis about autism according to which autistic children use overt behaviour in order to control a malfunctioning autonomic nervous system and suggest that they have learned to avoid using certain processing areas in the temporal lobes.
Hirstein
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W
Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. williamh@elmhurst.edu
Iversen
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P
Ramachandran
V S
VS
D000293:Adolescent; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012653:Self Stimulation