Functional connectivity changes during working memory in autism spectrum disorder: A two-year longitudinal MEG study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Working memory impairments have been reported in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and associated with functional outcomes and social difficulties. However, little is known about the developmental trajectory of working memory in youth with ASD. The current magnetoencephalography (MEG) study is the first to examine the longitudinal development over two years of working memory networks in youth with ASD. We analysed MEG data from 32 children and adolescents with and without ASD (64 datasets; 7-14 years), all tested twice at a two-year interval, during a visual n-back task, with two loads (1- and 2-back). We performed a whole-brain functional connectivity analysis to examine the networks during the successful recognition of visual stimuli. We demonstrate that youth with ASD show decreased connectivity in the theta frequency (4-7 Hz) in the higher memory load (2-back) condition compared to typically developing (TD) controls. This hypo-connected theta network was anchored in primary visual areas with connections to frontal, parietal and limbic regions. These network differences were found despite similar task performance between ASD and TD groups. Within the TD group, we found an increase in alpha (8-14 Hz) connectivity at Time 2 compared to Time 1 in both the 1- and 2-back conditions. These findings demonstrate the continued development of working memory mechanisms over middle childhood, which were not apparent in youth with ASD. Together, our findings support a network-based approach to understanding atypical neural functioning in ASD and the developmental trajectories of working memory processes over middle childhood.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".