Pubmed du 23/07/23
1. Keating CT, Ichijo E, Cook JL. Autistic adults exhibit highly precise representations of others’ emotions but a reduced influence of emotion representations on emotion recognition accuracy. Sci Rep;2023 (Jul 22);13(1):11875.
To date, studies have not yet established the mechanisms underpinning differences in autistic and non-autistic emotion recognition. The current study first investigated whether autistic and non-autistic adults differed in terms of the precision and/or differentiation of their visual emotion representations and their general matching abilities, and second, explored whether differences therein were related to challenges in accurately recognizing emotional expressions. To fulfil these aims, 45 autistic and 45 non-autistic individuals completed three tasks employing dynamic point light displays of emotional facial expressions. We identified that autistic individuals had more precise visual emotion representations than their non-autistic counterparts, however, this did not confer any benefit for their emotion recognition. Whilst for non-autistic people, non-verbal reasoning and the interaction between precision of emotion representations and matching ability predicted emotion recognition, no variables contributed to autistic emotion recognition. These findings raise the possibility that autistic individuals are less guided by their emotion representations, thus lending support to Bayesian accounts of autism.
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2. Pesthy O, Farkas K, Sapey-Triomphe LA, Guttengéber A, Komoróczy E, Janacsek K, Réthelyi JM, Németh D. Intact predictive processing in autistic adults: evidence from statistical learning. Sci Rep;2023 (Jul 22);13(1):11873.
Impairment in predictive processes gained a lot of attention in recent years as an explanation for autistic symptoms. However, empirical evidence does not always underpin this framework. Thus, it is unclear what aspects of predictive processing are affected in autism spectrum disorder. In this study, we tested autistic adults on a task in which participants acquire probability-based regularities (that is, a statistical learning task). Twenty neurotypical and 22 autistic adults learned a probabilistic, temporally distributed regularity for about 40 min. Using frequentist and Bayesian methods, we found that autistic adults performed comparably to neurotypical adults, and the dynamics of learning did not differ between groups either. Thus, our study provides evidence for intact statistical learning in autistic adults. Furthermore, we discuss potential ways this result can extend the scope of the predictive processing framework, noting that atypical processing might not always mean a deficit in performance.
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3. Powers S, Likhite S, Gadalla KK, Miranda CJ, Huffenberger AJ, Dennys C, Foust KD, Morales P, Pierson CR, Rinaldi F, Perry S, Bolon B, Wein N, Cobb S, Kaspar BK, Meyer K. Novel MeCP2 Gene Therapy is Effective in a Multicenter Study using Two Mouse Models of Rett Syndrome and is Safe in Non-human Primates. Mol Ther;2023 (Jul 21)
The AAV9 gene therapy vector presented in this study is safe in mice and non-human primates and highly efficacious without causing overexpression toxicity, a major challenge for clinical translation of Rett Syndrome gene therapy vectors to date. Our team designed a new truncated methyl CpG binding protein 2 (MeCP2) promoter allowing widespread expression of MeCP2 in mice and non-human primates after a single injection into the cerebrospinal fluid without causing overexpression symptoms up to 18 months post injection. Additionally, this new vector is highly efficacious at lower doses compared to previous constructs as demonstrated in extensive efficacy studies performed by two independent laboratories in two different Rett syndrome mouse models carrying either a knockout or one of the most frequent human mutations of MeCP2. Overall, data from this multicenter study highlights the efficacy and safety of this gene therapy construct, making it a promising candidate for first in human studies to treat Rett syndrome.
