The Article wrote:
In the trust game, one player receives an amount of money and then sends whatever amount he or she wants to the other player via computer message. The amount sent is tripled and the player at the other end then decides how much of the tripled amount to send back. The game has several rounds.
During this interaction, Montague and his colleagues evaluated the brains’ response by watching bright spots in the brain that represent increased blood flow and thus brain activity. Prior work had shown that during the trust game, most of the activity occurs in an area called the cingulate cortex.
To hone their picture of the “self” response in that part of the brain, Montague and his colleagues had 81 athletes (football, baseball and soccer players as well as members of the Houston Ballet) take part in an imagining task. They watched clips of various athletic activities while in the scanner. They then imagined themselves performing those activities. The pattern of activity in the cingulate cortex during that “imagining” reflected the “self” response.
Later the scientists identified the same “self” response in the cingulate cortices of normal subjects when they decided how much money to send to the other person. The pattern contrasted with the “other” response seen when the actions of their partner in the trust game were revealed to them.
The researchers then brought in 18 adolescent males with high functioning autism to play the game. Montague and his colleagues determined that the subjects understood the game and helped them adjust to the scanning procedure.
“It was the first time an autistic kid had been scanned in a social exchange,” said Montague.
The adolescents did not play the game differently from their partners, who were taken from a population of similar teens who did not have autism. They made similar amounts of money overall and round by round.
However, when the researchers scanned the brains of the youngsters with autism during the trust game, they found that the youngsters’ “self” responses were dim compared to those of normal subjects. Not only that, but the more serious the subject’s autistic symptoms, the dimmer the response.
The response occurred in the cingulate cortex. In a normal “self” response there, the brightest area was in the middle of that area of the brain. That response was significantly less in the brains of the youngsters with autism.
“They cognitively understood the game,” said Montague. “It’s not that they don’t understand the game. It’s that there is a very low level of ‘self’ response. It’s impaired in them and the degree to which it is missing correlates with their symptom severity. The more you are missing the self response, the more autistic you are.”
The basic upshot appears to be that the cingulate cortex lights up more for the NTs than it does for the autistics. The game itself seems to be a simple test of you send some dollars to an email address and hope for extra money back. (Sort of like replying to one of those SPAM emails, I guess ;-)
I still haven’t figured out whether the autistics were the senders, the triplers, or both, but I guess it’s not supposed to matter. The implication is that the “imaging yourself doing something” part of the brain didn’t work as hard in the autistics, therefore the autistics don’t relate as deeply with others.
That seems a rather obvious, but strangely tenuous bit of logic. There seem to be a lot of potential questions unanswered. For instance, is there a chance that 18-year old autistics may have already come to well-founded conclusions in a logical way about their relationships with others?
Or, is that really what that part of the brain is doing? Is it correct to assume that the fact that it lights up for the imaging athletes means that it has to do with “self ?” Perhaps it has to do with autistics caching certain self-centered role-playing activities faster than non-autistics do? Perhaps it’s just a question of processing – nothing to do with our “self response” being “impaired.” If autistics did poorly at the game, I might believe and impairment, but that didn’t happen. And I’m still not convinced this whole thing implies a deficit in our ability to recognize or model our selves.
On the question of “is this what that part of the brain is actually for”, this is from a Scientific American <http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=brain-area-foils-fear> article from last September :
Sci Am article wrote:
"For example, if someone is walking on an empty street at night and hears a loud banging sound in the near distance, the amygdala would immediately light up," explains Joy Hirsch of Columbia University, senior author of the paper presenting the result in the September 21 issue of Neuron. "Once the source is determined, the [anterior cingulate cortex] determines if action is needed or not. For example, if it was a car door slamming, the [anterior cingulate cortex] would shut down the amygdala."
So, is it possible that our brains (more like prey than predator according to Temple Grandin) have efficiently processed the meaning of the game and classified it as free of threats, whereas the NTs have to keep doing the same exercise over and over?
I don’t have the time for a full analysis, nor do I care, but these are a few of the many questions that come to me from this article.
And I’m sick of people coming up with proof after proof that I don’t care about other people. Just not true. Besides, it sounds a lot like an excuse for them to stop caring about us.
07 Feb 2008, 10:19 am
