Sustainable Development Goals
Abstract/Objectives
The diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) include two major features: deficits in social communication and interaction, and limited repetitive behaviors and interests (DSM-V, 2013). Part of the reasons for social difficulties may be due to the difficulty in processing visual facial information, and past researches have also found that ASD patients perform worse in many visual tasks than children with typical development. In more recent studies, it has been found that ASD patients have atypical lateralization performance in both language and visual tasks, and whether there is a specific correlation between atypical brain function lateralization in brain functions is an unknown question to be discussed in this study. This project includes 8 adults, 4 elementary school children with high-functioning autism and 4 children with typical development as objects, and explores the lateralization of language and visual functions in the same group of children during word recognition task and face recognition task. The results of the study showed that compared with children with typical development, the degree of lateralization of the brain in the execution of language and visual information was lower or insufficient, and the degree of lateralization of language and visual information was consistent among individuals.
Results/Contributions

In terms of the average accuracy and reaction time in the word recognition task (WR) and the face recognition task (FR), the results observed in this study are in line with the expectations, which means that adults group outperformed the children, while the typically developing children outperformed the children in the high-functioning autism group.

 

As for the brain lateralization in FR, the right hemisphere of the brain is highest in the adult group (LI=-1.76), followed by the children with typical development (LI=-1.21), and then the children with autism (LI=-1.02) ,while the brain lateralization in the WR task, the degree of brain lateralization in the adult group (LI=1.72) was higher than that of the children with typical development (LI=0.8), and the brain lateralization in the autistic children group (LI=-2.69) was more pronounced.

 

The results showed that the children with autism had a difference in the degree of lateralization of the brain compared with the paired group in visual tasks, and a difference in hemispheric dominance in language tasks compared with the paired group.

 

The results of this study are in line with expectations, which means that the autistic children group has a different degree of brain lateralization from the paired group in visual tasks, and a difference in hemispheric dominance in language tasks from the paired group.

Keywords
Autism Spectrum DisorderBrain Lateralizationfunctional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasonography