Autism and Beauty: Neural Correlates of Aesthetic Experiences in Autism Spectrum Disorder

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the neural activity of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) patients is different from that of normal individuals when performing aesthetic judgments. METHODS: We recruited typical ASD patients without savant skills (ASD group, n=17) and healthy controls (HC group, n=19) for an functional magnetic resonance imaging study. All subjects were scanned while performing aesthetic judgment tasks on two kinds of artwork (magnificent landscape images and fractal images). Differences in brain activation between the two groups were assessed by contrasting neural activity during the tasks. RESULTS: The aesthetic judgment score for all images was significantly lower in the ASD group than in the HC group. During the aesthetic judgment tasks, the ASD group showed less activation than the HC group in the anterior region of the superior frontal gyrus, and more activation in the temporoparietal area and insula, regardless of the type of images being judged. In addition, during the aesthetic judgment task for the fractal images, the ASD group exhibited greater neural activity in the amygdala and the posterior region of the middle/inferior temporal gyrus (Brodmann area 37) than the HC group. CONCLUSION: The results of this study suggest that the brain activation patterns associated with aesthetic experiences in ASD patients may differ from those of normal individuals.