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Publications of the Week

Weaker Neural Suppression in Autism

By June 18, 2020July 22nd, 2020No Comments

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This week we profile a recent publication in Nature Communications
from Dr. Michael-Paul Schallmo (pictured) at UW.

Can you provide a brief overview of your lab’s current research focus?

My lab is focused on understanding how the brain processes visual information, and how visual processing is disrupted in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. This includes work examining vision in people with psychosis and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). I use a variety of methods in this work including behavioral tests, functional MRI to measure neural responses, and MR spectroscopy to look at brain chemistry (all of which were used in this study).

What is the significance of the findings in this publication?

Our paper investigates differences in visual perception in people with autism versus neurotypical individuals. People with ASD often are hyper-sensitive to sensory stimuli; a loud sound or a bright light might be too intense for them, but not for other people. We also know that people with ASD can show enhanced visual perception of brief moving stimuli, but before our study we didn’t know what was happening differently in the brain to cause this difference in vision in ASD. We showed in this study that brain responses in a region of the visual cortex were different in people with ASD when they viewed moving images in an MRI scanner. We found that this difference in brain responses was related to the degree of sensory hyper-sensitivity reported by these people; individuals who were more sensitive also showed more of a difference in their brain responses (compared to neuro-typical brain responses). We originally hypothesized that this difference in visual perception in ASD might be caused by some dysfunction in brain chemistry, but our brain scans did not show any differences in brain chemicals between our ASD and neurotypical participants. Instead, we found (using a computer model of brain responses) that the difference in visual perception in ASD might be explained by a difference in how they focus their attention on objects in the visual world. We hope that this work might lead to new screening methods to better identify kids who are at risk for ASD and related conditions. It may also help scientists to find new targets for studies seeking to improve treatment for sensory symptoms in ASD.

Here is a link to the press release from UMN that has some more information: https://med.umn.edu/news-events/researchers-use-brain-imaging-demonstrate-weaker-neural-suppression-those-autism

What are the next steps for this research?

I am now working with colleagues at the University of Minnesota on a follow-up study of differences in visual perception in ASD, Tourette syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We believe that there may be important similarities in how the brain is functioning across these different disorders, as many people are diagnosed with more than one (e.g., ASD and ADHD).

This work was funded by:

National Institutes of Health (F32 EY025121 to MPS, R01 MH106520 to SOM, T32 EY00703).

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