Neural correlates of emotional inhibitory control in autism spectrum disorders.
Even when adults with autism perform inhibition tasks perfectly, their brains take a different road—especially the angular gyrus.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Velasquez et al. (2017) scanned adults with and without autism while they played an emotional stop-signal game.
The game showed faces looking happy, angry, or afraid. Players had to press a button fast, then stop if a red X popped up.
The team compared brain activation between the two groups even though both groups hit the same accuracy scores.
What they found
Adults with autism lit up the angular gyrus and fusiform gyrus more than controls.
They lit up the anterior cingulate less.
Despite these brain differences, their reaction times and error rates looked typical.
How this fits with other research
Voorhies et al. (2018) extends this picture to kids. They found odd resting-state wiring in the same control networks, showing the difference starts early.
Patton et al. (2020) conceptually replicate the task in children and add a twist: kids with autism show more trial-to-trial scatter in both brain waves and reaction time. The brain pattern looks messy, not just different.
Kuno-Fujita et al. (2020) link the extra fusiform activity to sensory avoiding. Adults who hate loud lights or tags in shirts also show more fusiform face activity, hinting that sensory style may drive the brain signature Francisco saw.
Why it matters
You cannot trust surface behavior. A client may stop, wait, or answer correctly yet still be using an atypical neural route. Build in sensory breaks and clear facial cues. If you see variable response times, do not assume fatigue—variability itself can be an ASD marker. Target angular-gyrus skills like spatial re-orienting with quick shift games to strengthen the network that helps emotional control.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Atypical inhibitory function is often present in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who may have difficulty suppressing context-inappropriate behaviors. We investigated the neural correlates of inhibition in ASD in response to both emotional and non-emotional stimuli using an fMRI Go/NoGo inhibition task with human faces and letters. We also related neural activation to behavioral dysfunction in ASD. Our sample consisted of 19 individuals with ASD (mean age=25.84) and 22 typically developing (TD) control participants (mean age=29.03). As expected, no group differences in task performance (inhibition accuracy and response time) were found. However, adults with ASD exhibited greater angular gyrus activation in face response inhibition blocks, as well as greater fusiform gyrus activation than controls, in a condition comparing face inhibition to letter inhibition. In contrast, control participants yielded significantly greater anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activation in letter inhibition blocks. A positive relationship between communication and language impairment and angular gyrus activation during face inhibition was also found. Group activation differences during inhibition tasks in the context of comparable task performance and the relationship between activation and dysfunction highlight brain regions that may be related to ASD-specific dysfunction.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2017 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2017.03.008