Variation in Autistic Behaviors Predicts Moment-to-Moment Neural Synchrony during Child-Caregiver Naturalistic Play

Abstract

In natural communication, people employ social cues to negotiate shared understandings of the environment. Known as neural synchrony, patterns of neural activity in higher-order brain regions are more similar in moments of shared understanding. However, autistic people rely less on ostensive cueing and may experience lower levels of neural synchrony. Here, in a sample of child-caregiver dyads that report normal and natural variation in autistic behaviors, we examined how variation in social behaviors – specifically joint attention and mutual gaze – shaped neural synchrony. Neural synchrony was found to increase during moments of joint attention and decrease during moments of mutual gaze, regardless of reported autistic behaviors. Interestingly, more reported autistic behaviors predict overall less neural synchrony, regardless of the presence of joint attention or mutual gaze. Here, neural synchrony potentially acts as a neural correlate for an individual’s propensity for generalization. In other words, nonautistic people move towards shared understandings while autistic people hold more space for alternative meanings. Overall, the investigation expands definitions of neural synchrony as an index of dynamic mutual understanding and proposes that propensity for generalization, intrinsically linked to variation in autistic behaviors, predicts neural synchrony.