Brain idiosyncrasy during biological-motion perception is amplified in autistic individuals with intellectual impairment

Journal article

Background: Neuroimaging research in autism spectrum condition (ASC) often overlooks brain idiosyncrasy by focusing on group averages and frequently excludes individuals with co-occurring intellectual impairment (II). Methods: We investigated functional MRI correlates of passive biological motion (BM) perception, comparing typically developing controls (TDC; n = 33), autistic individuals without II (intellectually able; ASC-IA; n = 28), and autistic individuals with II (ASC-II; n = 19; defined by IQ or adaptive function < 85). Results: While standard group-average analyses revealed the expected BM-sensitive regions (e.g., bilateral posterior superior temporal sulci, cuneus) in the TDC and ASC-IA groups, the ASC-II group showed no consistent group-level activation pattern and exhibited greater activation in the right intraparietal sulcus compared to the ASC-IA group. Using a correlational distance-based metric, we quantified brain idiosyncrasy (“whole-sample brain variability”, VariabilityWhole), representing the deviance of an individual's activation pattern from others. Brain activity in the ASC-II group was significantly more idiosyncratic than the ASC-IA and TDC groups. Furthermore, VariabilityWhole showed significant transdiagnostic correlations with multiple cognitive and behavioural domains relevant to autism, including social difficulties, repetitive behaviours, non-verbal IQ, executive function, sensory hyper/hyposensitivity, ADHD symptoms, and adaptive function. Conclusions: Key limitations include the cross-sectional design and the use of a passive viewing task without a concurrent behavioral measure to directly link brain findings to task performance. These findings highlight substantial brain heterogeneity within the autism spectrum, particularly in the understudied ASC-II subgroup, and suggest that individual differences in brain processing patterns, rather than solely group-average differences, are critically linked to clinical and cognitive phenotypes.

Authors: Cheng, M; Hawco, C; Yang, D; Ni, H; Yeh, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: BioMed Central
• Journal: Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 31
• Publication date: 2026-03-25
• Acceptance date: 2026-02-25
• DOI: 10.1186/s11689-026-09683-3
• EISSN: 1866-1955
• ISSN: 1866-1947
• Language: English
• Keywords: Heterogeneity; Social cognition; Autism spectrum condition; FMRI; Intellectual impairment; Biological motion; Brain idiosyncrasy