Disrupted development and imbalanced function in the global neuronal workspace: a positive-feedback mechanism for the emergence of ASD in early infancy.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is increasingly being conceptualized as a spectrum disorder of connectome development. We review evidence suggesting that ASD is characterized by a positive feedback loop that amplifies small functional variations in early-developing sensory-processing pathways into structural and functional imbalances in the global neuronal workspace. Using vision as an example, we discuss how early functional variants in visual processing may be feedback-amplified to produce variant object categories and disrupted top-down expectations, atypically large expectation-to-perception mismatches, problems re-identifying individual people and objects, socially inappropriate, generally aversive emotional responses and disrupted sensory-motor coordination. Viewing ASD in terms of feedback amplification of small functional variants allows a number of recent models of ASD to be integrated with neuroanatomical, neurofunctional and genetic data.
243 West Spain Street, Sonoma, CA 95476 USA.
Chris
0000-0002-4812-0744
C
Fields
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL 61920 USA.
James F
JF
Glazebrook
Categorization; Connectome; Predictive coding; Prenatal development; Resting-state networks; Small-world networks