Association Between Social Behavior and Face Responsiveness in Autistic and Healthy Brains

Savannah P. Hays*, Runnan Cao and Shuo Wang, Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and Department of Neuroscience, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Field (Broad Category): Neuroscience (Health Sciences) 

Student’s Major: Biomedical Engineering 

Face perception plays a key role in human’s social behavior and humans have a dedicated neural system to process faces. However, brain activation strength and patterns within this face-processing system vary substantially across neurotypical individuals and people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although there is a plethora of literature showing atypical face processing in people with ASD, the underlying neural mechanism for this profound social impairment still remains unclear. Furthermore, whether and how individual differences in neural response to faces are related to social behavior remains controversial. Solving these questions is important for unravelling the neural mechanism of face perception and providing new clues for autism diagnosis and early interference. In this study, we first investigated these questions by correlating the strength of neural activity in face-selective areas (i.e., brain areas that specifically respond when participants view faces) with behavioral measurements of social personality traits. Next, we compared brain-behavior association between neurotypical individuals and individuals with ASD. Our results from the neurotypical group showed a significant correlation between social behavior with 1) activation magnitude in the left amygdala, anterior temporal lobe (ATL), and right anterior superior temporal sulcus (raSTS), 2) size of the rpSTS and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Preliminary results from the ASD group showed no significant correlations between behavior and activation magnitude. Our findings suggest that prosocial behavior is associated with higher neural activity in face selective areas in healthy people. 

Funding: Dana Foundational Clinical Neuroscience Award 

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: WVU 497-level course WVU RAP and SURE