Hyper and hypo attention networks activations affect social development in children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience a range of social and non-social attention deficits. To date, most studies assessed the neurological framework or discrete behavioral traits related to one attention network, leaving a gap in the understanding of the developmental cascade affecting the inter-relations among attention networks in ASD in a pervasive manner. We propose a theoretical framework that integrates the behavioral deficits and neurological manifestations through a cohesive developmental prism of attention networks' activations while assessing their impact on social deficits in children with ASD. Insights arising from the model suggest hyper-and-hypoactivation of posterior attention networks leads to an altered prefrontal anterior attention network weight in ways that conjointly impact social performance in ASD. This perspective on how attention networks develop and interact in ASD may inform future research directions regarding ASD and attention development.

Keywords: alerting; attention; autism spectrum disorder; neurodevelopment; orienting.

FIGURE 1

Inter-relations between dorsal orienting (red) and arousal networks in (A) typical development and (B) ASD. Continuous arrows represent positive correlations, dashed arrows represent negative correlations. FEF, frontal eye field; IPS, intraparietal sulcus; FF, fusiform gyrus. Created with BioRender.com.

FIGURE 2

Inter-relations of ventral orienting (red) pathway and executive attention (blue) pathways in (A) typical development and (B) ASD. Continuous arrows represent positive correlations, dashed arrows represent negative correlations. TPJ, tempotoparietal junction; VFC, ventral frontal cortex; PFC, prefrontal cortex; ACC, anterior cingulate cortex; mCC, medial anterior cingulate. Created with BioRender.com.