Further support for this conclusion comes from an examination of areas in the brain, where activity was modulated by symptom severity. The visual areas identified in between-group analyses as showing stronger activity in the ASD children were the only areas in the brain where activity correlated with symptom severity: the more severe the ASD symptoms, the greater the activity in these visual areas. We therefore conclude that the abnormal activity observed in children with ASD in these regions is most likely indicative of a deficit in multisensory integration, observed most substantially (at both the neural and behavioral level) in children with the greatest symptom

severity. The findings Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of Mongillo et al. (2008) lend further support to this interpretation as they found that SRS scores were negatively correlated with scores on the McGurk test – a test of auditory and visual speech integration (McGurk and MacDonald 1976).

Thus, consistent with our results, greater symptom selleck screening library severity is associated Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical with less evidence of multisensory integration. The current findings – especially with regard to the positive correlation observed between symptom severity and neural activity in visual areas – are consistent with growing evidence of abnormal cortical connectivity in children with ASD (e.g., Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Kleinhans et al. 2008). It has been theorized that individuals with ASDs exhibit increased local connectivity, to the detriment of long-range connectivity (for review, see Minshew Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and Williams 2007). For example, several studies have identified thereby decreased connectivity between visual and frontal cortices (Villalobos et al. 2005; Koshino et al. 2008), and other studies have found increases in thalamocortical connectivity,

hypothesized to compensate for reduced cortico-cortical connectivity (Mizuno et al. 2006). Also, highly relevant to the current findings are studies reporting abnormal low-level visual processing (Bertone et al. 2005), visual hypersensitivity (Ashwin et al. 2009), and/or low-level Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical visual problems (Vandenbroucke et al. 2008) in individuals with ASD. In this Carfilzomib study, audiovisual integration – which depends on the synthesis of information from primary visual and auditory cortices – may be disrupted as a result of abnormal cortico-cortical connectivity and/or a specific deficit in visual processing. Future studies are needed to address these competing accounts. Finally, our findings are in line with considerable evidence suggesting specific deficits in integrating communicative cues in individuals with ASD (Williams et al. 2004; Mongillo et al. 2008; Whitehouse and Bishop 2008; Klin et al. 2009). Recently, Mongillo et al. (2008) found that for a group of children with ASD, deficits in audiovisual integration were more salient when stimuli involved audiovisual elements of human communication (i.e.