Potocki-Lupski syndrome (PTLS; MIM #610883), characterized by neurobehavioral abnormalities, intellectual disability and congenital anomalies, is caused by a 3.7-Mb duplication in 17p11.2. Neurobehavioral studies determined that ∼70-90% of PTLS subjects tested positive for autism or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We previously chromosomally engineered a mouse model for PTLS (Dp(11)17/+) with a...

While autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by communication impairments, social abnormalities, and stereotypic behaviors, several medical comorbidities are observed in autistic individuals. Of these, gastrointestinal (GI) abnormalities are of particular interest given their reported prevalence and correlation with the severity of core autism-related behavioral abnormalities. This rev...

Structural abnormalities in the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) are well-documented in schizophrenia and recent evidence suggests that these abnormalities relate to functional outcome. Cognitive control mechanisms, reliant on the LPFC, are impaired in schizophrenia and predict functional outcome, thus impaired cognitive control could mediate the relationship between neuroanatomical abnormaliti...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that mainly affects social interaction and communication. Evidence from behavioral and functional MRI studies supports the hypothesis that dysfunctional mechanisms involving social brain structures play a major role in autistic symptomatology. However, the investigation of anatomical abnormalities in the brain of people with autism has led to inconsistent...

Socioemotional abnormalities, including decreased social interactions and increased self-directed activity, were reported when rhesus monkeys with neonatal ablations of either the medial temporal lobe (AH) or the inferior temporal cortex (TE) were paired with unoperated peers at two and six months of age, though these abnormalities were more severe in Group AH (Bachevalier et al., 2001). As adu...

An important regulatory process in the development of behavior is cognition. However, cognition as a blanket term is far too broad to be useful. Rather, specific types of cognition need to be examined separately. One proposal is that one type of human reasoning evolved in a social context, to solve social problems. Here, we report two experiments that use autism to test a prediction from that t...

a current hypothesis relating to social dysfunction connected with psychiatric conditions including schizophrenia and autism (Nature (2011), 477, 171–178). The hypothesis states that an increase in the ratio of cortical cellular excitation to inhibition (termed the E/I balance) could cause social and cognitive deficits. However, it is not clear yet whether this may be an acute or a chronic effe...