News Finding: "The neurotypical children managed to identify a social interaction without social cues, such as interpreting the large triangle nudging the smaller one as a parent's attempt to encourage a child, but the ASD children were unable to make the connection."
Paper Finding: These findings of reduced activation in SFG/MPFC, TPJ, STS, and PCC are consistent with neuroimaging studies of ToM using these same animated stimuli in adults with ASD [ .
News Context: "One reason this finding is so interesting is that the 'actors' in the films have no faces, facial expressions or body posture on which to base a judgment of an emotion or attitude," said Rajesh Kana, associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "The neurotypical children managed to identify a social interaction without social cues, such as interpreting the large triangle nudging the smaller one as a parent's attempt to encourage a child, but the ASD children were unable to make the connection." "By studying children, we were able to show that it is possible to characterize the altered brain circuitry earlier in development, which could lead to designing earlier effective intervention programs that could train children to infer the intentions and thoughts that underlie physical interactions between people," Just said.
Paper Context: A separate cluster for TD > ASD was found more ventral in MPFC, although this cluster did not survive multiple comparisons correction. These findings of reduced activation in SFG/MPFC, TPJ, STS, and PCC are consistent with neuroimaging studies of ToM using these same animated stimuli in adults with ASD [ . Additionally, some of the areas of reduced activation in the ASD group for whole-brain analysis overlapped with regions from the HCP map.