Cortical underconnectivity coupled with preserved visuospatial cognition in autism: Evidence from an fMRI study of an embedded figures task.
Autistic people can match typical peers on embedded-figures puzzles while their brain networks show clear underconnectivity.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Damarla et al. (2010) put adults with high-functioning autism and typical adults inside an fMRI scanner. Both groups did the Embedded Figures Test: find a small shape hidden inside a bigger picture. The team watched brain activity and measured how well the groups performed.
They wanted to see if people with autism really have a 'local bias' and whether their brain areas talk to each other less.
What they found
On the outside, both groups finished the puzzles equally well and just as fast. Inside the brain, the autism group showed different activation and weaker connections between regions. The result supports the 'cortical underconnectivity' idea even when behavior looks normal.
How this fits with other research
Ferreri et al. (2011) ran the same Embedded Figures Test with autistic kids and also found equal accuracy and speed. This direct replication backs up Roy's behavioral null finding and makes it explicit.
Muth et al. (2014) pooled many visuo-spatial studies and saw small autism advantages on Block Design and figure disembedding. Their meta-analysis includes Roy's task, so the average gain hides the fact that some single studies find no speed edge at all.
Fitzgerald et al. (2015) scanned autistic teens during an attention task. Like Roy, they saw typical accuracy but weaker brain connectivity, extending the underconnectivity pattern to adolescents and a different task.
Bölte et al. (2007) looked at gestalt perception and reported weaker global processing in autistic adults. That behavioral deficit seems to clash with Roy's intact performance, but the tasks differ: gestalt tests force global seeing, while embedded figures reward local search, so both can be true.
Why it matters
You can't rely on puzzle scores alone to judge local-processing strength. Equal accuracy does not mean equal brains. When you see good visuospatial skills in a client, remember that hidden connectivity gaps may still affect learning or social tasks that need brain regions to work as a team.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with high-functioning autism sometimes exhibit intact or superior performance on visuospatial tasks, in contrast to impaired functioning in other domains such as language comprehension, executive tasks, and social functions. The goal of the current study was to investigate the neural bases of preserved visuospatial processing in high-functioning autism from the perspective of the cortical underconnectivity theory. We used a combination of behavioral, functional magnetic resonance imaging, functional connectivity, and corpus callosum morphometric methodological tools. Thirteen participants with high-functioning autism and 13 controls (age-, IQ-, and gender-matched) were scanned while performing an Embedded Figures Task. Despite the ability of the autism group to attain behavioral performance comparable to the control group, the brain imaging results revealed several group differences consistent with the cortical underconnectivity account of autism. First, relative to controls, the autism group showed less activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior parietal areas and more activation in visuospatial (bilateral superior parietal extending to inferior parietal and right occipital) areas. Second, the autism group demonstrated lower functional connectivity between higher-order working memory/executive areas and visuospatial regions (between frontal and parietal-occipital). Third, the size of the corpus callosum (an index of anatomical connectivity) was positively correlated with frontal-posterior (parietal and occipital) functional connectivity in the autism group. Thus, even in the visuospatial domain, where preserved performance among people with autism is observed, the neuroimaging signatures of cortical underconnectivity persist.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2010 · doi:10.1002/aur.153