Humans are born with an innate tendency to be social. Infants immediately seek out and are drawn to features in the environment such as faces and behave in ways to elicit and attract attention and responses from their caregivers. Human brains typically develop with rich social experience that starts from day one. However, without the rich experience of the social world, brain development can take very different developmental paths. In autism, difficulties with early social engagement are some of the first hallmark features and may dampen or attenuate the effect of early social experience on brain development. A cascade of subsequent altered developmental paths may mean that many later-developing aspects of more complex social cognition and social behavior are affected. Being social is also not just about how we think about and interact with others, but also how we understand and make sense of ourselves and how we see ourselves in relation to others. What is happening in early brain development in autism that causes this radical difference in the development of social-communication, cognition, and behavior? This theme of research examines this crucial symptom domain, with a special focus on understanding how the social brain develops.

Relevant Publications

Trakoshis, S., Martinez-Canada, P., et al., & Lombardo, M. V. (2020). Intrinsic excitation-inhibition imbalance affects medial prefrontal cortex differently in autistic men versus women. eLife, 9, e55684.

Lombardo, M. V., Eyler, L., Moore, A., Datko, M., Barnes, C. C., Cha, D., Courchesne, E., & Pierce, K. (2019). Default mode-visual network hypoconnectivity in an autism subtype with pronounced social visual engagement difficulties.. eLife, 8, e47427. doi:10.7554/eLife.47427.

Lombardo, M. V., et al., (2016). Improving effect size estimation and statistical power with multi-echo fMRI and its impact on understanding the neural systems supporting mentalizing. Neuroimage, 142, 55-66.

Lombardo, M. V., et al., (2010). Atypical neural self-representation in autism. Brain, 133, 611-624.

Lombardo, M. V., et al., (2010). Shared neural circuits for mentalizing about the self and others. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 1623-1635.

Lombardo, M. V., et al., (2016). Unsupervised data-driven stratification of mentalizing heterogeneity in autism. Scientific Reports, 6, 35333.

Lai, M. C., Lombardo, M. V., et al., (2019). Neural self-representation in autistic women and association with compensatory camouflaging. Autism, 23, 1210-1223.