Neuroscience of Cognitive Disorders_SC_2025_part2_preL

Social Cognition and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD):
- What is ASD?
- The "broken mirror" hypothesis.
- How is synchrony impacted in ASD?
- Differences in INS (interpersonal neural synchrony) between ASD vs Typical Development.
- Gender differences.
Social Cognition and ADHD:
- What is ADHD?
- ADHD and Social Cognition.
Social Cognition and Schizophrenia:
- What is Schizophrenia?
- The hypo-hyper-intentionality hypothesis.

Definition:
- Highly heritable neurodevelopmental disorder.
- Characterized by:
- Impaired or diminished social communication skills.
- Repetitive behaviors.
- Restricted sensory processing or interests.
Diagnosis:
- Relies on two main sources:
- Reports from parents or caregivers regarding the child's development.
- Professional observation of the child's behavior.

Definition of Mirror Neurons:
- Visuomotor neurons that become active during the execution and observation of an action.
Contributions to Social Cognition:
- Non-verbal communication and language perception (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2012).
- Empathy (Xu et al., 2019).
- Imitation (Campbell et al., 2018).
- Theory of Mind (ToM).

ASD's Impairments:
- Causes impairments in action understanding such as gaze direction and not following an agent’s head movement (Boria et al., 2009; Vivanti et al., 2006).
Hypothesis Proposal:
- A global dysfunction of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) could be behind ASD (Ramachandran & Oberman, 2006).

Physiological Findings:
- ASD individuals showed lower corticospinal excitability when watching a hand perform transitive actions compared to a static hand, indicating reduced MNS activity.
- Reduced MNS activity correlated with greater social difficulties (Enticott et al., 2012).

Concerns include:
- Methodological issues such as confounding variables, inadequacies in controls, and measurement precision (Hobson & Bishop, 2016, 2017).
- Reliance on correlational data.
- Challenges in replication (Galli et al., 2025).
Alternative Models:
- Hamilton (2008, 2013) proposed two models:
- EP-M Model: Indicates intact planning or emulating pathways but impaired mimicry pathways, affecting social functioning and emotional recognition.
- STORM (Social Top-Down Response Modulation) Model: Suggests failure to modulate mimicry based on social context due to developmental impairments in the mPFC and frontal regulation.

ASD and Mimicry:
- Atypical facial mimicry intensity observed in children with ASD, with ToM acting as a mediator (Liu, Wang & Song, 2022).
Processing Goal-directed Actions:
- Participants with ASD and healthy controls activated the Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) and Intraparietal Lobule (IPL) similarly for goal-directed actions.
- However, for non-goal directed actions, there was increased activity in the left ventral premotor and right middle temporal gyrus for ASD participants (Wadsworth et al., 2018).

Findings on Imitation and Synchrony:
- ASD children showed significantly reduced imitation accuracy, behavioral synchrony, and r-IPL INS during non-meaningful gestures (Du et al., 2023).
- Conversely, there was increased IPL activity during meaningful gestures (Du et al., 2023).

Proposes that individuals with ASD can imitate but struggle to adjust their mimicry according to social cues due to impairments in the mPFC and frontal regions, leading to abnormal MNS responses.
Empirical Findings:
- Neurotypical individuals outperformed ASD patients in imitating hand movements following prosocial priming (Cook & Bird, 2012).
- Deficits in inhibiting automatic imitation based on social cues correlate with reduced mPFC and TPJ activity during ToM tasks in ASD (Spengler et al., 2010).

ASD participants exhibited decreased INS in the TPJ and r-IPL compared to controls, with symptom severity affecting neural synchrony during cooperative tasks (Quiñones-Camacho et al., 2021; Hirsch et al., 2022; Li et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2020).
Interpersonal neural synchrony during a joint task was lower in the ASD group, especially in the ToM network, as indicated by voxel activity correlations seen in “Despicable Me” clips (Lyons et al., 2020).

Gender significantly impacts the presentation of ASD symptoms, which can vary considerably between males and females (Schuck, Flores & Fung, 2019; Young, Oreve & Speranza, 2018).
Observations in Preschool Females:
- More synchronous and quicker response times;
- Engaged in longer and more complex interactions with psychologists, ending interactions appropriately for their developmental level compared to withdrawn behaviors (Paolizzi et al., 2022).

Focus on Male Samples:
- Most research and diagnostic criteria (DSM 2013; ICD 2011) have centered around autistic males, with a documented ratio of 171:43 (males to females) in research studies.
Implicit Biases:
- Unconscious gender biases exist, associating autistic traits more strongly with men (Brickhill et al., 2023).
- Media representation often shows autistic characters predominantly as male (Bhargava & Ashwin, 2025; D’Mello et al., 2022; Fredriksen et al., 2025; Happé & Frith, 2020; Li et al., 2025; Williams, Coppolino & Perreault, 2021).

Definition of ADHD:
- Neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by:
- Pronounced inattention.
- Impulsive behaviors.
- Hyperactivity or a persistent restlessness.
- Early signs usually emerge in childhood, particularly hyperactivity and inattention, which may reduce with age, but difficulties often persist into adulthood.

Social cognition is mildly impaired in ADHD cases:
- Emotion recognition deficits (d ≈ 0.40–0.44, notably in anger and fear).
- Theory of Mind (ToM) performance (d = 0.43), with more pronounced deficits observed in children (d = 0.56 vs. 0.04) (Bora & Pantelis, 2015; Kofler et al., 2011).

During facial recognition, higher gamma activity observed in the occipital lobe compared to other regions in ADHD.
EEG differences compared with healthy controls included:
- Right intra-hemisphere,
- Left intra-hemisphere,
- Interhemispheric,
- Fronto-occipital (Novak et al., 2024; Ravazi et al., 2017).