Abstract #0444
Visual-motor connectivity relates to autism trait severity
Mary Beth Nebel 1,2 , Ani Eloyan 3 , Carrie Nettles 1 , Kristie Sweeney 1 , Katarina Ament 1 , Rebecca Ward 1 , Ann S Choe 1,2 , Anita D Barber 1,2 , Brian S Caffo 3 , James J Pekar 1,2 , and Stewart H Mostofsky 1,2
1
Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, MD,
United States,
2
Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United
States,
3
Johns
Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, United
States
One problem experienced by children with autism that is
potentially critical for acquiring social skills is
difficulty imitating others actions, which depends on
visual-motor integration; however, it is unclear what
brain mechanisms contribute to this deficit. Using
resting state functional MRI, we show that children with
autism exhibit significantly stronger anticorrelation
between motor and visual areas compared to their
typically developing (TD) peers, and the stronger the
anticorrelation between motor and visual networks, the
more severe their autistic traits. In TD children,
motor-visual functional connectivity strength was
correlated with imitation performance; children with
stronger positive visual-motor coupling were better
imitators.
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