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Relationship Between Degree of Neuroanatomic Abnormality and Visual Orienting Deficits in Young Children with Autism

出版	University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 1997
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=ry2L4JNQqOAC&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Visual orienting, an aspect of visual attention which has been shown to be impaired in autistic individuals and related to cerebellar damage, was studied in 22 children provisionally diagnosed with autism, 17 MA-matched controls, and 15 CA-matched controls. All children were administered a Posner paradigm, which enabled examination of specific attention operations such as speed of orienting to a cue, and two naturalistic paradigms which examined orienting and duration of attentional responses to toys presented during a play session. The central objectives of this study were to (1) determine the relationship between early neuroanatomic indices and later attentional behavior in children who all met diagnostic criteria for autism at early ages; (2) explore the relationship between neuroanatomy, attention, and diagnostic outcome; and (3) probe for attentional impairment as compared to normally developing children. Subsequent to participation in the current studies, all provisionally-autistic children were re-diagnosed as part of a larger longitudinal study. Children who received confirmed diagnoses of autism were slower to orient attention in all paradigms than both control groups. In the naturalistic paradigms, children with autism also were slower to orient attention than children who no longer met criteria for autism and were re-diagnosed with PDD-NOS. In contrast to studies reporting selective social orienting deficits in autism, for all groups orienting was significantly faster when stimuli were presented in a social context than when presented alone. However, in the autism group, stimuli presented socially did not hold attention longer than stimuli presented alone, in contrast to controls, who looked significantly longer at social stimuli. For the provisionally-autistic group as a whole, orienting in all 3 paradigms was significantly correlated with posterior cerebellar vermis area, but not with age, IQ, frontal lobe volume, corpus callosum area, or total brain volume, supporting previous research findings of a specific role of the cerebellum in the rapid deployment of attentional resources. Duration of attentional response to social vs. nonsocial stimuli in the naturalistic paradigm was associated with frontal lobe and total brain volumes. Studies such as these which directly quantify brain-behavior relationships in autistic children are a fruitful and important area for investigation.