C Kemner

..For this reason, sensory filtering was measured in children with autism using the P50 gating paradigm...

..The question was addressed whether patients with MCDD show the same psychophysiological abnormalities as seen in patients with schizophrenia...

..Thus abnormalities in SPEM would appear not to be a marker of PDD. The earlier reported abnormalities in visual motion processing might need to be reinterpreted...

..Thus, while olanzapine was a relatively safe medication in children, its clinical relevance in children with pervasive developmental disorder may be limited...

..It was concluded that a smaller amplitude of this peak is specific to children with ADHD...

..The conclusion that methylphenidate did not influence response processes contrasts sharply with findings reported by authors using the Sternberg memory search task...

..Furthermore, methylphenidate had enhancing effects on performance and ERPs, but did not improve the capacity-allocation deficit...

..Non-responders showed significantly higher plasma concentrations of both D- and L-threo MPH enantiomers...

..CONCLUSIONS: We concluded that autistic children show a lower level of attentional engagement...

..The results show no evidence for specific abnormalities in looking behavior to either faces or to complex stimuli in high functioning children with PDD...

..Importantly, present results argue against the idea that this is due to a reduced face expertise on the part of the children with PDD, but instead support an abnormality in spatial frequency processing...

..Therefore, the present study investigated the existence of deficits in spatial frequency processing at an early sensory level in children with PDD...

..Thereby, present results extend former results showing that global and local processing is dependent on spatial frequency and mapped retinotopically in the visual cortex...

..The effect of methylphenidate (MPH) on inhibitory control as assessed by the stop task in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could be influenced by task difficulty and may be mediated by attention...

..This effect did not reach significance, which could be due to the small N of the study. Therefore, the data need replication in a study with larger samples before more definitive conclusions can be drawn...

..Detection of occasional visual target patterns was impaired in patients. This was paralleled by a reduction in an attention-related brain potential, which has been associated previously with anterior cingulate cortex functioning...

..It is not clear whether the brain activity related to gaze processing is also normal in children with PDD...

..Also, no evidence for frequency-related hemispheric lateralization was found. SIGNIFICANCE: Insight is provided into the functional-anatomical basis of longer-latency frequency-related differences in processing...

..In conclusion, the inter-rater reliability and stability of the diagnoses of ASD established at 23 months in this population-based sample of very young children are good...

..It is suggested that the effects of MPH on attention are due to a combination of noradrenergic and dopaminergic mechanisms. The improved inhibition under DMI could be serotonergically mediated...

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..The results suggest that autistic subjects show abnormal capacity allocation. Some of these abnormalities may dissolve over time, while others remain into adolescence...

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..It has been suggested that communicative impairments among individuals with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) might be caused by an inability to integrate synchronously presented visual and auditory cues...

..No evidence was found for a different search strategy between the groups. The data indicate an enhanced ability to discriminate between stimulus elements in PDD...

..However, there is little knowledge on the role of feedbackward processing in this group. This question is of importance, as recent studies indicate that feedback processing is critical in stimulus integration...

..e., local and global information)...

..Intermediate phenotypes or endophenotypes may facilitate genetic research if they display a simpler mode of transmission than schizophrenia itself, i.e., if they reflect more closely the underlying genetic effects...

..A reconciliation of the different outcomes is proposed based on spatial frequency processing in ASD...

..We aimed to test both automatic processing of facial affect as well as the integration of auditory and visual emotion cues in individuals with PDD...

..In addition, given the reconciliation between our findings and previous neuropathology and neurochemistry research, we suggest that atypical horizontal interactions might reflect a more general neural abnormality in this disorder...

..Interestingly, performance improved in the ASD group when repeating the task two additional times, indicating a compensation for the imbalance between feedforward and feedback processing...

..We suggest that seeing a facial expression, an emotional body expression or hearing an emotional tone of voice all activate the affect program corresponding to the emotion displayed...

..CONCLUSIONS: The results showed no evidence for an important role of the frontal cortex in abnormalities in selective attention in children with ADHD. Also, the data did not indicate that MPh normalizes brain activity in these children...

..CONCLUSIONS: These results point to abnormalities in brain processes involved in motor inhibition and error-detection in ADHD children...

..Since no effects on habituation were found, this suggests that neither enhanced noradrenergic nor decreased dopaminergic activity is involved in this process...

..In this paper we compared the outcome of a linear registration method for brain images of psychiatric and control groups of different ages in order to assess the relative adequacy of normalization in such diverse groups...

..Identifying structural brain abnormalities under genetic control is of particular importance as these could represent endophenotypes of autism...

..It is suggested that subjects with PDD show abnormal activation of visual pathways dedicated to the processing of high and low spatial frequencies...

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..It was concluded that the abnormalities in selective attention in adolescents with PDD have a normalizing effect on P3, and possibly act as a compensatory process...

..This finding implicates that any problems arising from integrating auditory and visual information must stem from higher processing stages in high-functioning adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder...

..This relates well to the perseverative behaviour that is seen in children with ASD. We discuss these results in terms of a general deficit in self-monitoring, underlying social disturbance in ASD and the involvement of the ACC...

..Association was also detected for several polymorphisms in the promoter and untranslated region of NRCAM, suggesting that alterations in expression of this gene may be linked to autism susceptibility...

..The hypothesis that a smarter brain runs faster may need to be refined: a smarter brain's feedback connections run faster...

..Neurexins team with previously implicated neuroligins for glutamatergic synaptogenesis, highlighting glutamate-related genes as promising candidates for contributing to ASDs...

..Methylphenidate's ameliorating effects might be established through its influence on brain networks including posterior (parietal) cortex, enabling children with ADHD to allocate more attention to significant events...