Reduced interhemispheric interaction in non-autistic individuals with normal but high levels of autism traits.
People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show superior performance for tasks requiring detail-focused processing. Atypical neural connectivity and reduced interhemispheric communication are posited to underlie this cognitive advantage. Given recent conceptualization of autism as a continuum, we sought to investigate whether people with normal but high levels of autism like traits (AQ) also exhibit reduced hemispheric interaction. Sixty right-handed participants completed the AQ questionnaire (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001) and a lateralised letter matching task that assessed unilateral and bilateral performance in response to simple (physical) and complex (identity) matches. Whereas people with low self-rated AQ scores showed a bilateral advantage for the more complex task, indicating normal interhemispheric interaction, people in the high AQ group failed to show a bilateral gain for the computationally demanding stimuli. This finding of disrupted interhemispheric interaction converges with a dimensional conceptualisation of ASD, suggesting that the structural anomalies of ASD extend to non-autistic individuals with high levels of autism traits.
School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Electronic address: natalie.okeefe@uqconnect.edu.au.
Natalie
N
O'Keefe
Annukka K
AK
Lindell
D000328:Adult; D054022:Cerebrum / Q000502:physiology*; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D014794:Visual Fields; D055815:Young Adult
AQ; Autism; Interhemispheric interaction; Weak central coherence