Abstract
Impairments in social interaction are a key feature of autism and are associated with atypical social information processing. Here we report functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results showing that individuals with autism failed to activate superior temporal sulcus (STS) voice-selective regions in response to vocal sounds, whereas they showed a normal activation pattern in response to nonvocal sounds. These findings suggest abnormal cortical processing of socially relevant auditory information in autism.
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Acknowledgements
We thank C. Pallier and J. B. Poline for support and advice and L. Mottron for useful comments on the manuscript. Supported by the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada; the Fonds de Recherche en Santé du Québec; the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, INSERM, France; the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, CEA, France; the France Foundation and the France-Télecom Foundation.
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Supplementary information
Supplementary Fig. 1
Voice versus non-voice - individual analysis. Coronal slices of each subject illustrate the activation peaks for the contrast voice minus non voice in individual analysis, P < 0.001. (PDF 225 kb)
Supplementary Table 1
Individual data. (PDF 20 kb)
Supplementary Table 2
Intra-group analysis. (PDF 17 kb)
Supplementary Table 3
Inter-group analysis. (PDF 17 kb)
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Gervais, H., Belin, P., Boddaert, N. et al. Abnormal cortical voice processing in autism. Nat Neurosci 7, 801–802 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1291
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1291
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