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Nouchine Hadjikhani, M.D.

(MGH/EPFL Brain-Mind Institute)

Mirror neurons and autism: let's face it!

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders involving impairment in social and emotional skills. In particular, ASD individual have difficulties reading social-communicative information from faces. Several recent studies have challenged earlier findings that individuals with ASD have no activation of the fusiform gyrus (fusiform face area, FFA) when viewing faces, and I will comment and illustrate this. I will then present fMRI data of face-processing in ASD and controls revealing normal activation in FFA but hypoactivation in a more widely distributed network of brain areas involved in face processing [including the right amygdala, inferior frontal cortex (IFC), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and face-related somatosensory and premotor cortex]. I will relate these findings with measures of cortical thickness in a group of ASD subjects that revealed a thinning of areas of the social-emotional brain, in particular of areas of the mirror neurons system. Finally I will present evidence that difficulty in emotion processing is not limited to faces but pertains to the interpretation of whole body emotional expression. I will conclude with current evidence of a mirror neuron system disturbance in ASD.