Emotional Proactive Brain Study in Adults With Autism Spectrum Condition

Emotional Proactive Brain Study in Adults With Autism Spectrum Condition

This project aims:

• to study behavioral and cerebral activity specificity (latency and amplitude of evoked potentials, time frequency maps and cerebral connectivity) in predictive process (top-down regulation) during visual recognition of static and dynamic stimuli in adults participants with autism spectrum conditions compared to typically developed participants.
• to study the relation between predictive process and autonomous response (heart activity and electrodermal activity)
• to explore potential sex differences between autistic males and females

Once eligibility criteria would have been verified, information on the study will be given and non opposition of the participant will be collected.Then, the participant will be comfortably installed in order to pass the Landolt C task (visual acuity task) on a computer. If his vision is normal, electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG) and electrodermal activity (EDA) of participants, will be recorded during visual processing and recognition tasks. Stimuli will include emotional and non emotional pictures and films, filtered in coarse-to-fine versus fine-to-coarse sequences in order to stimulate or not predictive process described by Bar (2007).

The participant will also have to complete an abbreviated version of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, IVth edition (Wechsler, 2003), and the Autism Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) if he never did it before. The aim is to pair as much as possible group by IQ and to verify that control participants don't present autistic traits above the Autism Spectrum Quotient cutoff. Groups will also be paired by age and education level.

Inclusion Criteria:

• affiliation to the french social protection care
• information and non opposition of the participant
• information and non opposition of tutor/curator if the case presented
• normal or corrected to normal vision
• capacity to understand and apply instruction required by the task
• no participation in another research
• for autistic person: formal diagnosis of autism spectrum condition (autism/asperger/PDD-NS) according to CIM-10/DSM-IV/DSM-5 criteria

Exclusion Criteria:

• adults with no ability to express their consent
• adults on judiciary protection
• perceptive/motor/neurological/psychiatric issue
• major health issue (cardiac, metabolic ...)
• alcohol or drug consumption