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Right amygdala and caudate activation patterns predict implicit attitudes toward people with autism spectrum disorders and physical disabilities, respectively

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Abstract

Attitudes toward people with disabilities tend to be negative, regardless of the visibility of the disorder traits. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience stigmatization that is rooted in negative attitudes or prejudice toward them because of their social awkwardness. The neural underpinnings of attitudes toward people with disabilities remain unclear. In this study, we focused on implicit attitudes toward people with ASD and physical disabilities, which are more visible than ASD, and investigated whether implicit attitudes were predicted by using neural activity with multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) in the prejudice network. Thirty-six, right-handed, Japanese, university students without disabilities participated. Two implicit association tests (IAT) toward people with ASD and physical disabilities revealed negative implicit attitudes. In the MRI scanner, participants performed a one-back task by using the same picture sets of IATs to examine their neural responses toward people with ASD and physical disabilities. According to the MVPA results, activation patterns of the right amygdala and right caudate significantly predicted implicit attitudes toward people with ASD and physical disabilities, respectively. These results suggest that implicit attitudes toward ASD and physical disabilities can be predicted by using neural signals from different regions within the prejudice network.

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Data availability

All data generated and/or analyzed during this study are not publicly available due to the conditions of our ethics approval. The data may be made available based on receipt of a reasonable request to the corresponding author (SY).

Code availability

Codes for data analysis are available in Github.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participants for their time and great effort.

Funding

This work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 18K13221 and partly supported by the Cooperative Research Project Program of Joint Usage/Research Center at the Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, Tohoku University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts and Science, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Nishiku, Fukuoka, 819-0395, Japan

    Susumu Yokota

  2. Division of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, IDAC, Tohoku University, 4-1 Seiryocho, Aobaku, Sendai, 980-8575, Japan

    Teruo Hashimoto, Yutaka Matsuzaki & Ryuta Kawashima

  3. RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, 1-4-1 Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, 103-0027, Japan

    Shigeyuki Ikeda

Authors
  1. Susumu Yokota
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  2. Teruo Hashimoto
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  3. Yutaka Matsuzaki
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  4. Shigeyuki Ikeda
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  5. Ryuta Kawashima
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Contributions

SY: Conceptualization; RK: Supervision; SY, YM, and TH: Investigation; SY: Data curation, Visualization, Writing – original draft; IK and SI: Methodology & Software, Formal analysis; SY, TH, YM, SI, and RK: Writing – review & editing.

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Correspondence to Susumu Yokota.

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Ethics approval

This study was conducted in accordance with the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the internal ethics committee of the Faculty of Arts and Science, Kyushu University (approval number; 201814).

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There are no conflicts of interest.

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Written informed consent was obtained from all individual participants or parents if they were aged under 20 before the experiment.

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Yokota, S., Hashimoto, T., Matsuzaki, Y. et al. Right amygdala and caudate activation patterns predict implicit attitudes toward people with autism spectrum disorders and physical disabilities, respectively. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 23, 1610–1619 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-023-01126-z

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