29928
Reduced Beta Connectivity during a Music Familiarity Task in Children with Autism

Poster Presentation
Friday, May 3, 2019: 11:30 AM-1:30 PM
Room: 710 (Palais des congres de Montreal)
C. P. De Barros Freitas1, S. M. Wong2,3, L. Ristic4, S. Fragiadakis5, S. Chow4, A. Iaboni5, B. Dunkley6, M. J. Taylor7, J. P. Lerch8 and E. Anagnostou5, (1)Holland Bloorview Research Institute, Autism Research Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada, (2)Division of Neurosurgery, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada, (3)Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, (4)Bloorview Research Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada, (5)Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, Toronto, ON, Canada, (6)Diagnostic Imaging, Hospital for Sickkids, Toronto, ON, Canada, (7)The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada, (8)Mouse Imaging Centre, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada
Background:

Background: Emerging evidence suggests autism is a disorder of brain connectivity and atypical reward processing has been proposed as an explanation for social deficits in ASD. Music is a valuable tool to study human cognition, emotion and reward networks and it is also an auditory stimulus that interests and motivates children with ASD.

Objectives: To examine both whole brain and seed analysis functional connectivity in the reward networks associated with familiarity and liking of music listening in children with ASD compared to typical controls.

Methods: 23 children with autism (ASD) and 23 typically developing children (TDC) children, between 7 to 14 years old, matched on age and sex were recruited. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) was used to measure brain activation and neural synchrony, while listening to different types of music (familiar liked, familiar disliked, unfamiliar liked and unfamiliar disliked). These music selections were chosen by the children and then matched with unfamiliar songs (of the same genre, tempo and mode) for presentation in the MEG.

Results: 23 ASD (mean age 10.09 ± 1.41) and 23 TDC (mean age 10.26 ± 1.85) of IQ>70 have been recruited. Findings revealed a network of reduced beta-band amplitude synchronization in the unfamiliar disliked music in children with ASD compared to controls (p=0.004, corrected). Also, we found increased low gamma amplitude synchronization in the familiar disliked music condition in children with ASD (p=0.003, corrected). Seed analysis of the reward networks are currently underway.

Conclusions: These findings reinforce theories suggesting that beta-band connectivity is important for establishing long-range communication among brain regions and reduced beta synchronization in the ASD group could reflect inadequate processing in task-dependent networks. On the other hand, gamma-band (30 to 80 Hz) abnormalities have been reported in many studies of ASD and are associated with impaired perceptual and cognitive functions.

See more of: Neuroimaging
See more of: Neuroimaging