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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

pRF Amplitude Differs within the Ventral Visual Processing Stream in Autism

Charlotte A. Leferink¹, Yeo Bi Choi, Peter Angeli, Adam Steel, Caroline E. Robertson¹; ¹Dartmouth College

Presenter: Charlotte A. Leferink

Retinotopic activation patterns in visual regions have been shown to differ between autistic and neurotypical individuals (Schwarzkopf et al., 2014), and may contribute to differences in perception and memory that characterize the condition (Robertson and Baron-Cohen, 2017). Recent work has shown that the posterior-anterior transition from perceptual to memory-related areas is marked by an increase in negative amplitude retinotopic responses, which are thought to play a role in to mnemonic processing (Steel et al., 2021; Steel*, Silson*, et al., 2024) and have not been investigated in individuals with autism. Here, we explored the distribution of retinotopic voxels and their amplitudes from perceptual to mnemonic areas along the ventral visual stream using fMRI and voxel-level modeling. We found that the control group had more retinotopic voxels within parahippocampal place area (PPA) and the ventral place memory area (vPMA) than the autism group. Further, while both groups showed a greater proportion of negative amplitude voxels within mnemonic areas relative to PPA, autists had a greater average percentage of negative retinotopic voxels in PPA and in vPMA than the controls. These findings provide evidence for neural processing differences in autistic individuals that extend beyond early visual cortex into memory processing regions.

Topic Area: Object Recognition & Visual Attention

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF