Soziales Gehirn im Autismus: Emotionserkennung durch Körperbewegung

01/01/2019 to 31/12/2021

PRINCIPAL RESEARCH QUESTION: is to clarify whether difficulties in social cognition in autistic individuals are related to deficient body motion (BM) processing, and, if so, whether this connection may, at least partly, account for a core deficit of ASD individuals in social cognition. In other words, we address the issues (1.1) whether behavioral measures of performance on BM tasks and recognition of emotions through BM are related to each other; (1.2) to what extent the two brain networks underlying processing of BM and expressive body language reading are impaired in autism; and (1.3) whether functional neuronal communication in the social brain is altered in autistic individuals. Based on previous data, we assume that we will uncover specific impairments in these two brain networks in several key hubs of the social brain such as the right STS and FFA.