Article
Psychology, Developmental
Lilja Kristin Jonsdottir, Janina Neufeld, Terje Falck-Ytter, Johan Lundin Kleberg
Summary: Studies have shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tend to avert their gaze from both eyes and mouths. This attentional avoidance is not specific to eyes and is not related to anxiety symptoms.
JOURNAL OF AUTISM AND DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Charlotte Viktorsson, Sven Bolte, Terje Falck-Ytter
Summary: This study investigated the looking behavior of typically developing toddlers and toddlers later diagnosed with autism when observing other children interact. The findings showed that toddlers with later autism had shorter gaze duration on the girl's face during the interaction, suggesting differences in social gaze in children with autism and the importance of studying gaze dynamics on short time scales.
JOURNAL OF AUTISM AND DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS
(2023)
Article
Psychiatry
Kyongmee Chung, Eunsun Chung
Summary: This pilot study examined the effectiveness of an app-based intervention (Yface) in improving social skills, facial perception, and eye gaze in children with autism spectrum disorder. The results showed that the Yface group demonstrated improvements in face perception and some social skills compared to waitlist controls, and in eye gaze compared to the Ycog group.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHIATRY
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Daniel Toensing, Bastian Schiller, Antonia Vehlen, Ines Spenthof, Gregor Domes, Markus Heinrichs
Summary: This study used a novel dual eye-tracking setup to investigate the impact of gaze anxiety on gaze behavior in naturalistic, face-to-face interactions. The results showed that individuals with gaze anxiety exhibit normal gaze behavior and the perceived quality of interactions was not affected.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Hisashi Murakami, Takenori Tomaru, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama
Summary: Pedestrians' coordinated actions in a crowd may be achieved through mutual anticipation. Our experiment found that visually distracting one pedestrian decreased the level of behavioral coordination, while blocking their gaze information alone did not alter their walking. Eye movement analysis showed that pedestrians' gaze direction changed depending on the uncertainty of the oncoming pedestrian's motion.
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Yige Wang, Shuai Peng, Zhi Shao, Tingyong Feng
Summary: Previous studies have shown reduced attention to the eyes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, most eye-tracking evidence regarding this impairment has been derived from passive viewing tasks. This study compared passive viewing of faces with an active task involving face identification and found that autistic children exhibited reduced eye-looking in passive viewing, but displayed increased attention allocation to the eyes when instructed to identify faces. These findings also indicated that diminished eye-looking may be related to the severity of autism symptoms in young ASD children.
JOURNAL OF AUTISM AND DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS
(2023)
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Paolo Masulli, Martyna Galazka, David Eberhard, Jakob Asberg Johnels, Christopher Gillberg, Eva Billstedt, Nouchine Hadjikhani, Tobias S. Andersen
Summary: Gaze patterns during face perception can predict autistic traits and depression symptoms. A data-driven method was used to analyze gaze patterns and their relation to diagnostic test scores, offering an alternative approach to gaze data analysis.
Article
Psychology, Clinical
Woo-Jin Cha, Kiho Kim
Summary: This study aimed to explore whether the decline in emotion recognition ability in individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP) could be more clearly identified as task complexity increased and whether it could be influenced by their eye-gaze patterns. The results showed that the more difficult the task, the clearer the significant relationships between autistic traits and emotion recognition ability. The BAP group had lower accuracy when recognizing emotions with mild emotional intensity presented with context, and they also looked less at faces compared to the control group.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLINICAL AND HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Z. Ambarchi, K. A. Boulton, R. Thapa, E. E. Thomas, M. M. DeMayo, N. J. Sasson, I. B. Hickie, Adam J. Guastella
Summary: Reduced social and object attention is observed in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), regardless of the presence of circumscribed interests (CIs). This finding suggests a diminished role of CIs and extends previous evidence of atypical attention patterns in ASD across social and non-social domains.
JOURNAL OF AUTISM AND DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS
(2022)
Review
Behavioral Sciences
Jacqueline A. Riddiford, Peter G. Enticott, Alex Lavale, Caroline Gurvich
Summary: This review explored the association between eye gaze and social functioning in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The findings suggest that increased gaze towards the face/head and eye regions is associated with better social functioning and reduced autism symptom severity in ASD. However, gaze allocation to the mouth seems to depend on the social and emotional content of scenes and the cognitive profile of individuals. Future research should include longitudinal studies and investigate the influence of different presentations of ASD.
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Kenza Latreche, Nada Kojovic, Martina Franchini, Marie Schaer
Summary: Early intervention is beneficial for children with ASD, but predictors of response to intervention are still unclear. Social orienting level has been found to be a significant predictor of developmental gains and treatment outcome in children with ASD.
Article
Biology
Yibin Wang, Haixia Long, Qianwei Zhou, Tao Bo, Jianwei Zheng
Summary: This study proposes a position-aware graph-convolution-network-based model for the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), with superior accuracy and interpretability. The model utilizes a time-series encoder for feature extraction and a connectivity generator to model the correlation with long-range dependencies. It also adopts a position embedding technique to differentiate brain nodes with different locations and employs a rarefying method for reducing dimensionality complexity. The experiments conducted on Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and provide potential biomarkers for ASD clinical diagnosis.
COMPUTERS IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Alisa Baron, Vanessa Harwood, Daniel Kleinman, Luca Campanelli, Joseph Molski, Nicole Landi, Julia Irwin
Summary: This article investigates the effect of task demands on gaze patterns in face-to-face communication through two eye-tracking experiments. The results reveal that participants fixated more on the mouth when audiovisual information was visible, and shifted their gaze to the eyes when articulatory information was not visible. This suggests that adults may seek additional cues from the mouth to support processing when faced with the need to disambiguate changes in speech.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Sidrah Liaqat, Chongruo Wu, Prashanth Reddy Duggirala, Sen-Ching Samson Cheung, Chen-Nee Chuah, Sally Ozonoff, Gregory Young
Summary: This paper proposes two machine learning methods, synthetic saccade approach and image based approach, for automatically classifying ASD based on children's eye gaze data. Experimental results show that the ASD prediction accuracy reaches 67.23% on the validation dataset and 62.13% on the test dataset.
SIGNAL PROCESSING-IMAGE COMMUNICATION
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Nicholas Hedger, Bhismadev Chakrabarti
Summary: The study found significant differences in how neurotypical adults and adults with autism spectrum disorders evolved their attention towards social stimuli over time. Neurotypical individuals showed an initial increase, followed by a decline and subsequent recovery in social attention after prolonged viewing, while individuals with autism exhibited a continuous decline without recovery. This may suggest reduced responsivity to the reward value of social stimuli in individuals with autism and highlights the importance of exploring the temporal nature of gaze behaviours for explaining attention in autism.
Article
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging
Lihua Sun, Richard Aarnio, Erika Atencio Herre, Salli Karna, Senthil Palani, Helena Virtanen, Heidi Liljenback, Jenni Virta, Aake Honkaniemi, Vesa Oikonen, Chunlei Han, Sanna Laurila, Marco Bucci, Semi Helin, Emrah Yatkin, Lauri Nummenmaa, Pirjo Nuutila, Jing Tang, Anne Roivainen
Summary: Photoperiod affects the availability of mu-opioid receptors (MOR) in brown adipose tissue (BAT), and sympathetic innervation may regulate thermogenesis via the peripheral MOR system.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NUCLEAR MEDICINE AND MOLECULAR IMAGING
(2023)
Editorial Material
Endocrinology & Metabolism
Kyoungjune Pak, Tuulia Malen, Severi Santavirta, Seunghyeon Shin, Hyun-Yeol Nam, Sven De Maeyer, Lauri Nummenmaa
Article
Neurosciences
Isobel L. L. Ward, Erika P. P. Raven, Stephan de la Rosa, Derek K. K. Jones, Christoph Teufel, Elisabeth von dem Hagen
Summary: Facial expression and body posture recognition have developmental trajectories. The interactions between face and body perception also change with development. This study used complementary diffusion MRI measures and quantitative MRI myelin-proxy measure to investigate the white matter tracts in face and body selective networks in children and adolescents. The results highlighted the age-dependent and age-independent constraints of white-matter microstructure on perceptual abilities and the importance of complementary microstructural measures in linking brain structure and behavior.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Kyoungjune Pak, Tatu Kantonen, Laura Pekkarinen, Pirjo Nuutila, Lauri Nummenmaa
Summary: This study aimed to integrate genomic mapping with protein expression from PET scans to compare the predictive power of CB1 receptor with other neuroreceptors/transporters. The results showed moderate to strong correlations between gene and protein expression for CB1 receptor, as well as other genes, which is important for improving and accelerating drug development.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging
Lihua Sun, Sanna Laurila, Minna Lahesmaa, Eleni Rebelos, Kirsi A. Virtanen, Katharina Schnabl, Martin Klingenspor, Lauri Nummenmaa, Pirjo Nuutila
Summary: This study reveals that secretin can induce satiation by modulating the metabolic communication between brown adipose tissue and the brain. Secretin regulates the brain response to appetite-inducing stimuli and improves inhibitory control, leading to increased feelings of fullness.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NUCLEAR MEDICINE AND MOLECULAR IMAGING
(2023)
Article
Health Care Sciences & Services
Isabelle Budin-Ljosne, Barbara B. Friedman, William F. C. Baare, David Bartres-Faz, Rebecca B. Carver, Christian A. Drevon, Klaus P. Ebmeier, Anders M. Fjell, Paolo Ghisletta, Richard N. Henson, Rogier Kievit, Kathrine S. Madsen, Laura Nawijn, Sana Suri, Cristina Sole-Padulles, Kristine B. Walhovd, Eniko Zsoldos
Summary: The involvement of stakeholders in the "Lifebrain" project was seen as meaningful and relevant, benefiting both researchers and stakeholders. However, there were barriers such as lack of time, difficulties in identifying relevant stakeholders, and challenges in communicating scientific issues. Stakeholder engagement in basic brain research requires dedicated resources, clear communication, and defined roles and responsibilities.
HEALTH EXPECTATIONS
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Vesa Putkinen, Sanaz Nazari-Farsani, Tomi Karjalainen, Severi Santavirta, Matthew Hudson, Kerttu Seppala, Lihua Sun, Henry K. K. Karlsson, Jussi Hirvonen, Lauri Nummenmaa
Summary: Despite the fact that men showed stronger enjoyment of and interest toward sexual stimuli than women, the brain activity differences between sexes in response to sexual stimuli are still unknown. Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether visual sexual stimuli elicit different brain activity patterns in men and women. The results revealed that men exhibited stronger activation in the visual and prefrontal cortices and dorsal attention network compared to women. The findings also showed that the sex of the subject could be accurately predicted based on the brain activity generated by sexual stimuli.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Janne Nordberg, Frederic L. W. V. J. Schaper, Marco Bucci, Lauri Nummenmaa, Juho Joutsa
Summary: Structural brain lesions are the most common cause of adult-onset epilepsy. The specific location of the lesion may be associated with the risk of secondary seizure generalization from focal to bilateral tonic-clonic seizures.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2023)
Article
Psychology
Marek A. Pedziwiatr, Elisabeth von dem Hagen, Christoph Teufel
Summary: Humans constantly move their eyes to explore the environment. Recent developments indicate a complex relationship between image-computable features and object representations in eye-movement control. This study demonstrates that eye movements are influenced by both image-computable features and knowledge-driven perceptual organization, with fixations becoming more object-centered and less dispersed once images are organized into objects.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-HUMAN PERCEPTION AND PERFORMANCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Lauri Nummenmaa, Tuulia Malen, Sanaz Nazari-Farsani, Kerttu Seppala, Lihua Sun, Severi Santavirta, Henry K. Karlsson, Matthew Hudson, Jussi Hirvonen, Mikko Sams, Sophie Scott, Vesa Putkinen
Summary: In this study, using naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) approach, the researchers investigated the brain basis of perceiving laughter and crying. They found that laughter induced widespread activity in ventral visual cortex and superior and middle temporal and motor cortices, while crying activated thalamus, cingulate cortex, insula and orbitofrontal cortex. They were able to accurately predict laughter and crying episodes from the brain activity, with superior temporal cortex playing a significant role. These findings suggest that perceiving laughter and crying involve distinct neural networks that suppress each other to manage appropriate behavioral responses.
Article
Medicine, General & Internal
Marco Bucci, Patricia Iozzo, Harri Merisaari, Ville Huovinen, Heta Lipponen, Katri Raikkonen, Riitta Parkkola, Minna Salonen, Samuel Sandboge, Johan Gunnar Eriksson, Lauri Nummenmaa, Pirjo Nuutila
Summary: This study aimed to investigate the effects of maternal obesity on brain structure and metabolism in frail women and their reversibility in response to exercise. The results showed that offspring of lean/normal-weight mothers had higher white matter density compared to offspring of obese/overweight mothers. Exercise intervention resulted in an increase in white matter density, with a greater effect observed in offspring of lean/normal-weight mothers. These findings suggest that exercise has an impact on brain morphology and cognition in elderly frail women.
JOURNAL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE
(2023)
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Mueez U-Din, Eleni Rebelos, Teemu Saari, Tarja Niemi, Katharina Kuellmer, Olli Eskola, Tobias Fromme, Johan Rajander, Markku Taittonen, Martin Klingenspor, Pirjo Nuutila, Lauri Nummenmaa, Kirsi A. Virtanen
Summary: The expression of uncoupling protein 1 (UCP-1) in supraclavicular brown adipose tissue (BAT) is directly related to brain metabolism during cold stress. This relationship is observed in various brain regions, such as the hypothalamus, medulla, and frontal lobe. Future research is needed to determine the clinical implications of these findings, particularly in relation to cognitive functions under cold stress.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Scott D. Blain, Matthew A. Snodgress, Lauri Nummenmaa, Joel S. Peterman, Enrico Glerean, Sohee Park
Summary: We can understand and express emotions through our bodies and interpret the emotional states of others through their movements and postures. The ability to perceive affective bodily cues in social contexts is linked to our own experience and awareness of emotions. This study found that the ability to perceive emotions in others was associated with self-reported bodily experiences of happiness and anger.
PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS-THEORY RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Matthew Hudson, Severi Santavirta, Vesa Putkinen, Kerttu Seppaelae, Lihua Sun, Tomi Karjalainen, Henry K. Karlsson, Jussi Hirvonen, Lauri Nummenmaa
Summary: Difficulties in social interactions are common in both autism and schizophrenia. This study aimed to investigate if there are different patterns of neural activity and neural synchronization associated with biological motion perception in individuals with autistic and schizotypal traits. The results showed that autistic traits were associated with decreased neural activity in specific brain areas, while schizotypal traits were associated with decreased neural synchronization in different brain areas. These findings suggest that differences in neural mechanisms may contribute to the distinct features of autism and schizophrenia in the general population.
SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Kyoungjune Pak, Lauri Nummenmaa
Summary: This study investigated the association between dopamine receptor availability and overweight/obesity using Bayesian and frequentist meta-analysis. The results showed that there was no difference in dopamine receptor availability between lean and overweight/obese subjects, but this effect was dependent on the radiopharmaceutical and the degree of obesity.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Jose Sanchez-Bornot, Roberto C. Sotero, J. A. Scott Kelso, Ozguer Simsek, Damien Coyle
Summary: This study proposes a multi-penalized state-space model for analyzing unobserved dynamics, using a data-driven regularization method. Novel algorithms are developed to solve the model, and a cross-validation method is introduced to evaluate regularization parameters. The effectiveness of this method is validated through simulations and real data analysis, enabling a more accurate exploration of cognitive brain functions.
