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Review
. 2004 Oct 20;24(42):9228-31.
doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3340-04.2004.

Autism and abnormal development of brain connectivity

Matthew K Belmonte  1 , Greg Allen, Andrea Beckel-Mitchener, Lisa M Boulanger, Ruth A Carper, Sara J Webb
Affiliations
Review

Autism and abnormal development of brain connectivity

Matthew K Belmonte et al. J Neurosci. .
No abstract available

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Potential effects of network connectivity patterns on brain activation. In the network on the left, a combination of strong local connectivity within delimited groups of neural units and selective long-range connectivity between local groups constitutes a computational structure within which information can be efficiently represented and efficiently propagated. Inputs (double arrows) evoke representations that are easily differentiable from noise (single arrow) and can be linked across regions, yielding high computational connectivity. In the network on the right, strongly connected subregions are not appropriately delimited and differentiated, and computationally meaningful long-range connections fail to develop. The brain images at bottom, from a visual attention task, display distributed patterns of functional activation in the normal brain (left) and abnormally intense and regionally localized activation in the autistic brain (right), a pattern that may stem from such differences at the network level.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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