It is clear to most that autism entails at least some form of social dysfunction at every level on the spectrum. Be it a debilitating response to touch or a subtle aversion to eye gaze, social impairments are an obvious problem for people with autism. It only makes sense then that if we can find out what mechanisms are malfunctioning then we can make our best efforts to correct them.

So what’s the cause of this dysfunction? Well we are not that sure yet, but Pelphrey and Morris have an idea.

As discussed in their article, the STS region of the brain seems to have significant importance in a person’s ability to interpret social interactions. To test this idea, Pelphrey and Morris monitored the STS region of the brain in response to goal directed behavior. In the study an attention grabber flashed on the screen, eliciting the animated person’s attention. The animation then had two choices; look at the attention grabber or don’t. When the animated figure attended to the checker board, the STS region in the observer responded with increased brain activity. But interestingly enough, even higher levels were elicited when the animated figure looked away from the attention grabber. Simply put, the STS was surprised!

So what does this mean? The STS region of the brain has expectations when participating in social interactions. The human brain has the ability to perceive the actions of others before they happen.

When it comes to studying autism this seems to be an important component. When people diagnosed with autism participated in the same experiment, their STS region did not discriminate between a congruent response and an incongruent response. This seems to imply that people with autism are deficient in social interaction at the neural level.

After reading this article, I thought to myself one thing: let’s retrain the STS region in order to help facilitate social interactions in people with autism.

The idea is not completely absurd as many other studies have shown that even infants can be trained to produce brain functions more advanced than expected for their age. For example, the famous “sticky mittens” experiment enabled children who were too young to grasp on their own, the ability to reach for things. When the infants received this new found ability to “grasp,” they were suddenly able to better perceive the goals and actions of other people in similar grasping situations. More amazingly, these results were able to generalize to other goal directed situations. Similar results are revealed in Sommerville’s study where they gave children canes to reach distant objects.

If infants with lower brain functioning can be taught to perceive and interpret the goal’s and actions of other people, why can’t we use similar techniques to alter the brain functioning of people with autism? Obviously much more research is necessary, but based on the infant studies, we already know that social interactions can be fostered and encouraged using early training. If comparable manipulations can be devised to fit their specific dysfunctions, perhaps these training devises can be added to early intervention programs for autistic children. If we can train autistic children have to read differences in eye gaze and facial expressions perhaps the STS region of the brain will start to respond in similar ways to typically developing children. Even though many parts of social interactions seem not to come naturally to autistic people, why shouldn’t we be able to teach them?