AGEN 375

Part 1. Autism Spectrum Disorder: the Neurobiology of Social-Emotional Deficits Marks: 30 Space suggestions: up to 1.5 TYPED page for all - 750 words Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that is due, in part, to atypical neuronal migration and maturation starting in fetal development. Unfortunately, the disorder is not commonly diagnosed until around age 4 when symptoms become prominent. At that time, the symptoms can present along a wide range of severity. One symptom critical to diagnosis is the impaired ability to interpret social cues – such as reading the emotions of others. Studies indicate that ASD children who receive early training in social-emotional processing are less impaired in social deficits, than their untrained peers, as they mature. JHA410 students wanted to characterize emotion-based face-processing in recently-diagnosed ASD children using a multimodal approach. They conducted the following experiments (below) with ASD children (average age 4 +/- 1 yr) and age/sex/race-matched controls. The results are shown on the following page (Figure 1). 1. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings were collected during presentation of one of two different faces on a screen: a neutral face or a smiling face. Two hundred face trials, were presented in a random order, for a total of 100 neutral faces and 100 smiling faces. MEG data were co-registered with individual T1 data. T1 data were then registered to a child template space. MEG data were averaged across subjects, within each group (controls, ASD). 2. 1H-Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy for N-acetylaspartate (NAA). A 6cm3 voxel localized to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) investigated levels of NAA in controls vs ASD. Based on course material, the experiments described above, and the re