Friday, 7 November 2008
9:00 - 10:00 AM

Coffee served in the lobby 8:30 a.m.

The Seminar will be held in the Gonda Center First Floor Conference Room, Rm 1357
E5 on the South sector of the UCLA Campus Map.

All are welcome!

For further information contact Candace Wilkinson at (310) 825-9041.

Abstract:
The talk will present data on the basal ganglia in autism, specifically reward and implicit learning systems, using functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We suggest that disruption of this system could account for several core features of autism such as motor stereotypies, rigidity in learning and poor response to endogenous rewards such as facial affect. Using a probabilistic classification task for children we examine both social and non-social rewards and their effect on learning. This task has been shown to activate the ventral striatum, an area implicated in reward processing, and the dorsal striatum, implicated in implicit learning, in healthy adults. Using fMRI we found that children with autism have a deficit in basal ganglia function generally, as well as a deficit in ventral striatum activity specifically in response to rewards. Several other tasks including imitation/observation of facial affect and language learning also show deficits in the basal ganglia in autism. Finally, we demonstrate that the magnitude of activity in the ventral striatum correlates with social skills development in typical children. Together these findings implicate a role for impaired reward system function in autism that may directly impact social skills and language development.