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. 2024 Jun 18;14(1):14038.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-64387-9.

Sex differences in social brain neural responses in autism: temporal profiles of configural face-processing within data-driven time windows

Teresa Del Bianco  1   2 , Meng-Chuan Lai  3   4   5   6   7 , Luke Mason  8   9 , Mark H Johnson  10 , Tony Charman  9 , Eva Loth  9 , Tobias Banaschewski  11 , Jan Buitelaar  12 , Declan G M Murphy  9 , Emily J H Jones  8 ; AIMS-2-TRIALS LEAP Team
Collaborators, Affiliations

Sex differences in social brain neural responses in autism: temporal profiles of configural face-processing within data-driven time windows

Teresa Del Bianco et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Face-processing timing differences may underlie visual social attention differences between autistic and non-autistic people, and males and females. This study investigates the timing of the effects of neurotype and sex on face-processing, and their dependence on age. We analysed EEG data during upright and inverted photographs of faces from 492 participants from the Longitudinal European Autism Project (141 neurotypical males, 76 neurotypical females, 202 autistic males, 73 autistic females; age 6-30 years). We detected timings of sex/diagnosis effects on event-related potential amplitudes at the posterior-temporal channel P8 with Bootstrapped Cluster-based Permutation Analysis and conducted Growth Curve Analysis (GCA) to investigate the timecourse and dependence on age of neural signals. The periods of influence of neurotype and sex overlapped but differed in onset (respectively, 260 and 310 ms post-stimulus), with sex effects lasting longer. GCA revealed a smaller and later amplitude peak in autistic female children compared to non-autistic female children; this difference decreased in adolescence and was not significant in adulthood. No age-dependent neurotype difference was significant in males. These findings indicate that sex and neurotype influence longer latency face processing and implicates cognitive rather than perceptual processing. Sex may have more overarching effects than neurotype on configural face processing.

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Conflict of interest statement

M-CL has received editorial honorarium from SAGE Publications. JB has been a consultant to/member of advisory board of/and/or speaker for Takeda/Shire, Roche, Medice, Angelini, Janssen, and Servier. He is not an employee of any of these companies, and not a stock shareholder of any of these companies. He has no other financial or material support, including expert testimony, patents, royalties. TC has served as a paid consultant to F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. and Servier; and has received royalties from Sage Publications and Guilford Publications. The remaining authors declare no competing interests of any kind.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Onset and offsets of the time-clusters listed in Table 2.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Change of amplitude in the two conditions (top and bottom plots), and difference between the two conditions (middle plot) at P8. In the middle plot, the amplitude forms a peak followed by a trough (i.e., an approximated Z-shape plotted horizontally, accentuated in the neurotypical female children) corresponding to the significant positive cubic component found in the GCA.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Scatterplot of FSIQ and the individual random effects of Intercepts and Slopes. The significant correlation between these variables in the neurotypical females is marked with a capitalised “*”.
Figure 4
Figure 4
An example of set-up and stimuli used in the experiment.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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