Wider minicolumns in autism: a neural basis for altered processing?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous studies have found alterations in the columnar organization of the cortex in autism spectrum disorders. Such changes have been suggested to be limited to higher order association areas and to spare primary sensory areas. In addition, evidence from gene-expression studies have suggested that there may be an attenuation of cortical differentiation in autism spectrum disorders. The present study specifically assessed the minicolumns of cells that span the depth of the cortex in a larger sample of autism spectrum disorder cases than have been studied previously, and across a broad age range. The cortical regions to be investigated were carefully chosen to enable hypotheses about cortical differentiation and the vulnerability of association cortex to be tested. Measures of the minicolumnar arrangement of the cortex (minicolumn width, spacing and width of the associated axon bundles) were made in four regions of cortex (primary auditory cortex, auditory association cortex, orbital frontal cortex and inferior parietal lobe) for 28 subjects with autism spectrum disorder and 25 typically developing control subjects. The present study found wider minicolumns in autism spectrum disorder [F(1,28) = 8.098, P = 0.008], which was particularly pronounced at younger ages, providing evidence for an altered developmental trajectory at the microstructural level. In addition, altered minicolumn width was not restricted to higher order association areas, but was also seen in the primary sensory region investigated. Finally, this study found evidence that cortical regional differentiation was still present in autism spectrum disorder [F(3,39) = 5.486, P = 0.003], although attenuated compared to typically developing subjects [F(3,45) = 18.615, P < 0.001]. It is suggested that wider spacing of the minicolumns may relate to the enhanced discrimination seen in some individuals with autism spectrum disorders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".