Skip to main content
bioRxiv
  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • ALERTS / RSS
Advanced Search
New Results

Neurocognitive mechanisms of social inferences in typical and autistic adolescents

View ORCID ProfileGabriela Rosenblau, Christoph W. Korn, Abigail Dutton, Daeyeol Lee, Kevin A. Pelphrey
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/850552
Gabriela Rosenblau
1Center for Translational Developmental Neuroscience, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
3Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute, George Washington University and Children’s National Medical Center; Washington DC, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • ORCID record for Gabriela Rosenblau
Christoph W. Korn
2Institute for Systems Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg 20246, Germany
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Abigail Dutton
1Center for Translational Developmental Neuroscience, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Daeyeol Lee
4The Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, Department of Neuroscience, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Maryland 21218, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Kevin A. Pelphrey
1Center for Translational Developmental Neuroscience, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
5Department of Neurology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22908, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • Abstract
  • Full Text
  • Info/History
  • Metrics
  • Supplementary material
  • Preview PDF
Loading

Abstract

Background Many of our efforts in social interactions are dedicated to learning about others. Adolescents with autism have core deficits in social learning, but a mechanistic understanding of these deficits and how they relate to neural development is lacking. The current study aimed to specify how adolescents with and with autism represent and acquire social knowledge and how these processes are implemented in neural activity.

Methods Typically developing (TD) adolescents (N=26) and adolescents with autism (N=20) rated in the MR scanner how much three peers liked a variety of items and received trial-by-trial feedback about the peer’s actual preference ratings. In a separate study, we established the preferences of a new sample of adolescents (N=99), used to examine population preference structures. Using computational models, we tested whether participants in the MR study relied on preference structures during learning and how model predictions were implemented in brain activity.

Results TD adolescents relied on average population preferences and prediction error (PE) updating. Importantly, PE updating was scaled by the similarity between items. In contrast, preferences of adolescents with autism were best described by a No-learning model that relied only on participants own preferences for each item. Model predictions were encoded in neural activity. TD adolescents encoded PEs in the putamen and adolescents with autism showed greater encoding of own preferences in the angular gyrus.

Conclusions We specified how adolescents represent and update social knowledge during learning. Our findings indicate that adolescents with ASD rely only on their own preferences when making social inferences.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
Back to top
PreviousNext
Posted November 21, 2019.
Download PDF

Supplementary Material

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Neurocognitive mechanisms of social inferences in typical and autistic adolescents
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from bioRxiv
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the bioRxiv website.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Share
Neurocognitive mechanisms of social inferences in typical and autistic adolescents
Gabriela Rosenblau, Christoph W. Korn, Abigail Dutton, Daeyeol Lee, Kevin A. Pelphrey
bioRxiv 850552; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/850552
Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo Google logo LinkedIn logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Neurocognitive mechanisms of social inferences in typical and autistic adolescents
Gabriela Rosenblau, Christoph W. Korn, Abigail Dutton, Daeyeol Lee, Kevin A. Pelphrey
bioRxiv 850552; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/850552

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Subject Area

  • Neuroscience
Subject Areas
All Articles
  • Animal Behavior and Cognition (3607)
  • Biochemistry (7581)
  • Bioengineering (5529)
  • Bioinformatics (20809)
  • Biophysics (10338)
  • Cancer Biology (7988)
  • Cell Biology (11647)
  • Clinical Trials (138)
  • Developmental Biology (6611)
  • Ecology (10217)
  • Epidemiology (2065)
  • Evolutionary Biology (13630)
  • Genetics (9550)
  • Genomics (12854)
  • Immunology (7925)
  • Microbiology (19555)
  • Molecular Biology (7668)
  • Neuroscience (42147)
  • Paleontology (308)
  • Pathology (1258)
  • Pharmacology and Toxicology (2203)
  • Physiology (3269)
  • Plant Biology (7051)
  • Scientific Communication and Education (1294)
  • Synthetic Biology (1952)
  • Systems Biology (5429)
  • Zoology (1119)