Laurent Mottron

Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies | HRDP · Department of Psychiatry

Language profiles in autism are variable and atypical, with frequent speech onset delays, but also, in some cases, unusually steep growth of structural language skills. Joint attention is often seen as a major predictor of language in autism, even though low joint attention is a core characteristic of autism, independent of language levels. In this...

The current "autism spectrum" DSM 5 diagnostic criteria and autism standardized diagnostic instruments promote considerable heterogeneity or clinical indecision and may be detrimental to the advancement of fundamental research on autism mechanisms. To increase clinical specificity and reorient research towards core autistic presentations, we propos...

Background Clinicians diagnosing autism rely on diagnostic instruments and criteria in combination with an implicit knowledge of the specific signs and presentations associated with the condition, based on clinical expertise. This implicit knowledge influences how diagnostic criteria are interpreted but cannot be directly observed. Instead, insight...

Diagnostic criteria used in autism research have undergone a shift towards the inclusion of a larger population, paralleled by increasing, but variable, estimates of autism prevalence across clinical settings and continents. A categorical diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is now consistent with large variations in language, intelligence, comorb...

The Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory version 4.0 (PedsQLTM4.0) is an internationally recognized, generic, health‐related quality of life (HRQoL) questionnaire, but its proxy 2–4-year-old version has not been validated in France. This study proposes a psychometric validation of this tool for French children aged 2 to 4 years and 11 months. A tota...

Early regression (ER) is often reported in autistic children with a prototypical phenotype and has been proposed as a possible pathognomonic sign present in most autistic children. Despite the uncertainties attached to its definition and report, using ER to anchor the autism phenotype could help identify the signs that best contribute to an autism...

Early regression (ER) is often reported in autistic children with a prototypical phenotype, and has been proposed as possible pathognomonic sign, present in mot autistic children. Despite the uncertainties attached to its definition and report, using ER to anchor the autism phenotype could help identify the signs contributing the best to the autism...

Survey‐based research with recruitment through online channels is a convenient way to obtain large samples and has recently been increasingly used in autism research. However, sampling from online channels may be associated with a high risk of sampling bias causing findings not to be generalizable to the autism population. Here we examined autism s...

Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common neurodevelopmental diagnosis showing substantial phenotypic heterogeneity. A leading example can be found in verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills, which vary from elevated to impaired compared with neurotypical individuals. Moreover, deficits in verbal profiles often coexist with normal or supe...

Quality of life (QoL) is an essential measure when assessing health interventions. Most early interventions for preschool children on the spectrum evaluate the effects on autism symptoms. However, researchers increasingly believe that good interventions should also improve the QoL of these children. Domains of QoL among preschool children on the au...

Starting early in life, autistics are characterized as having atypical facial expressions, as well as decreased positive and increased negative affect. The literature on autistic facial expressions remains small, however, with disparate methods and results suggesting limited understanding of common autistic emotions. Furthermore, unlike non-autisti...

Background Autism is a developmental condition, where symptoms are expected to occur in childhood, but a significant number of individuals are diagnosed with autism for the first time in adulthood. Here, we examine diagnoses given in childhood among individuals that are diagnosed with autism in adulthood, to investigate whether the late autism diag...

Since publication of the paper of Mottron and Bzdok [1], we have taken the opportunity to specify the risks/caveats of the claim that the heterogeneity of the so-called “autism spectrum” is forward progress [2]. We did so in responding [3] to the objections by recourse to the familial aggregation of various forms of the phenotype [4], the practical...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is commonly understood as an alteration of brain networks, yet case-control analyses against typically-developing controls (TD) have yielded inconsistent results. Here, we devised a novel approach to profile the inter-individual variability in functional network organization and tested whether such idiosyncrasy contri...

Lay abstract: The diagnostic criteria for autism are relatively vague and can lead to both under- and over-diagnosis if applied as a checklist. The highest level of agreement that a person is autistic occurs when experienced clinicians are able to make use of their clinical judgment. However, it is not always clear what this judgment consists of....

The “autism spectrum disorder” (ASD) construct and its current diagnostic criteria have led to the inclusion of increasingly heterogeneous and decreasingly atypical individuals under its definition. This broad category, based on the polymorphic clinical expression of common genetic variants underpinning the risk of autism, is likely beneficial for...

Longitudinal studies of siblings “at risk” of an autistic child provide information on the phenotypic precursors of an autistic presentation, its predisposing familial factors, and their developmental sequences. Their interpretation is based on our ability to clinically distinguish traits associated with the genetic predisposition for autism, found...

What does the way that autistic individuals bypass, learn, and eventually master language tell us about humans’ genetically encoded linguistic ability? In this theoretical review, we argue that autistic non-social acquisition of language and autistic savant abilities provide a strong argument for an innate, human-specific orientation towards (and m...

Autism is a developmental condition, where symptoms are expected to occur in childhood, but a significant number of individuals are diagnosed with autism for the first time in adulthood. Here we use the National Danish Patient Registry to investigate diagnoses given in childhood among those that are diagnosed with autism in adulthood (N = 2199). We...

Objective: To investigate the association between the comorbidity rates in autism and sex, birth year, and the age at which autism was first diagnosed, and compare the relative impact of each. Method: Using the Danish National Patient Registry, cumulative incidences up to the age of 16 for 11 comorbid conditions (psychosis, affective disorders,...

What does the way autistics bypass, learn, and eventually master language tell us about humans’ genetically encoded linguistic ability? In this theoretical review, we argue that autistic non-social acquisition of language, as well as autistic savant abilities, provide a strong argument for an innate, human-specific orientation toward (and mastery o...

The evolution of autism diagnosis, from its discovery to its current delineation using standardized instruments, has been paralleled by a steady increase in its prevalence and heterogeneity. In clinical settings, the diagnosis of autism is now too vague to specify the type of support required by the concerned individuals. In research, the inclusion...

Background Language delay is one of the major referral criteria for an autism evaluation. Once an autism spectrum diagnosis is established, the language prognosis is among the main parental concerns. Early language regression (ELR) is observed by 10–50% of parents but its relevance to late language level and socio-communicative ability is uncertain...

Autism is a common neurodevelopmental condition characterized by substantial phenotypic heterogeneity, which hinders diagnosis, research, and intervention. A leading example can be found in marked imbalances in language and perceptual skills, where deficits in one domain often co-exist with normal or even superior performance in the other domain. T...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is commonly understood as a network disorder, yet case-control analyses against typically-developing controls (TD) have yielded somewhat inconsistent patterns of results. The current work was centered on a novel approach to profile functional network idiosyncrasy, the inter-individual variability in the association be...

Asperger syndrome corresponds to a recognizable cluster of atypicalities, despite an unstable existence in psychiatric nosography. More a condition than a disorder, it merits recognition as an isolated entity within the autism spectrum, in particular because this is beneficial to those who identify themselves with it. In comparison with people with...

Speech onset delays (SOD) and language atypicalities are central aspects of the autism spectrum (AS), despite not being included in the categorical diagnosis of AS. Previous studies separating participants according to speech onset history have shown distinct patterns of brain organisation and activation in perceptual tasks. One major white matter...

Background: Studies on autistic strengths are often focused on what they reveal about autistic intelligence and, in some cases, exceptional and atypical reasoning abilities. An emerging research trend has demonstrated how interests and strengths often evident in autism can be harnessed in interventions to promote the well-being, adaptive, academic...

Objective: Deleterious copy number variants (CNVs) are identified in up to 20% of individuals with autism. However, levels of autism risk conferred by most rare CNVs remain unknown. The authors recently developed statistical models to estimate the effect size on IQ of all CNVs, including undocumented ones. In this study, the authors extended this...

The current diagnostic practices are associated to a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the last 30 years. Fragmenting the autism phenotype into dimensional "autistic traits" results in the alleged recognition of autism-like symptoms in any psychiatric or neurodevelopemental condition and in individuals decreasingly distant fro...

Objective Deleterious copy number variants (CNVs) are identified in up to 20% of individuals with autism. However, only 13 genomic loci have been formally associated with autism because the majority of CNVs are too rare to perform individual association studies. To investigate the implication of undocumented CNVs in neurodevelopmental disorders, we...

Although impairment in sensory integration is suggested in the autism spectrum (AS), empirical evidences remain equivocal. We assessed the integration of low-level visual and tactile information within and across modalities in AS and typically developing (TD) individuals. TD individuals demonstrated increased redundancy gain for cross-modal relativ...

Phénotype computationnel de l'interaction sociale au cours du développement, en lien avec les symptômes autistiques, anxieux et TDAH

Autism is a frequent, precocious behavioral constellation of social and communicative atypicalities associated with apparently restricted interests and repetitive behavior and paired with an uneven ability profile. Its definition has constantly broadened in the past 75 years, introducing phenotypes increasingly distant from its initial description,...

Oakley, Brewer, Bird, and Catmur (2016) investigated whether the Reading the Minds in the Eyes Test (RMET) measures emotion recognition rather than theory of mind (ToM). To explore this, 19 participants with autism and 23 controls, matched on alexithymia traits, were tested with the RMET, as well as the ToM Movie for Assessment of Social Cognition...

Autistic people have long been excluded from research questions that directly concern them. Consequently, individual as well as community issues affecting autistic people have been poorly understood, and research has sometimes failed to address the priorities identified by this population. To fill this gap, the report “A future made together” (Pell...

Abstract : From its earliest descriptions, autism has been considered a predominantly male condition, leading to the exclusion of autistic women from both research and clinical diagnosis. However, autism now appears to be more common in women than previously thought. Over the past decade, a number of researchers have uncovered slight differences in...

Importance The definition and nature of autism have been highly debated, as exemplified by several revisions of the DSM (DSM-III, DSM-IIIR, DSM-IV, and DSM-5) criteria. There has recently been a move from a categorical view toward a spectrum-based view. These changes have been accompanied by a steady increase in the prevalence of the condition. Cha...

Individuals with autism are reported to integrate information from visual and auditory channels in an idiosyncratic way. Multisensory integration (MSI) of simple, non-social stimuli (i.e., flashes and beeps) was evaluated in adolescents and adults with (n = 20) and without autism (n = 19) using a reaction time (RT) paradigm using audio, visual, and...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate superior performances on visuo-spatial tasks emphasizing local information processing; however, findings from studies involving hierarchical stimuli are inconsistent. Wide age ranges and group means complicate their interpretability. Children and adolescents with and without ASD completed...

Perception in autism is associated with positive emotions and intense interests, but sensory hypersensitivity represents a limited and poorly representative aspect of what characterizes autistic perception, which is a strength. An enhanced role of perception contributes to written and oral language learning, and to higher-order intelligence. Howeve...

Recent accounts of autistic perception, including Bayesian accounts, hypothesize a reduced influence of prior knowledge on perception across different domains in the autism spectrum (AS). The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of prior linguistic knowledge, in the form of phonemic categorical knowledge, on speech perception in a...

Two clinical trials targeting the vasopressin pathway in autism highlight continuing challenges in outcome measures and statistical power.

Background. Autism and synesthesia are neurodevelopmental conditions associated with variants of perceptual processing. They also share some genetic variants and include a large magnitude of intra-categorical variation: 60 types for synesthesia, as well as a spectrum for autism. In order to investigate the relationship between these two phenomena,...

A number of cross-sectional studies report extensive use of psychiatric services and high healthcare costs in autistic youths. However, little is known about how the use of these services evolves from the time of diagnosis, as children grow up. Our objectives were to investigate the use, costs, and predictors of psychiatric services following autis...

Background: Obesity in children on the autism spectrum (AS) is becoming a significant health concern. The purpose of this study was to identify the predictors of obesity in a cohort of AS youth and to assess the impact of psychoactive medication use while exploring the second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs) dose-response curve. Study design: A...

Stepping away from a normocentric understanding of autism goes beyond questioning the supposed lack of social motivation of autistic people. It evokes subversion of the prevalence of intellectual disability even in non-verbal autism. It also challenges the perceived purposelessness of some restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, and instead...

Behaviors characterized as restricted and repetitive (RRBs) in autism manifest in diverse ways, from motor mannerisms to intense interests, and are diagnostically defined as interfering with functioning. A variety of early autism interventions target RRBs as preoccupying young autistic children to the detriment of exploration and learning opportuni...

Little is known about long‐term outcomes. We investigate the adaptive trajectories and their risk factors in ASD. Data were obtained from 281 children prospectively followed untill adulthood. The final sample consisted of 106 individuals. Vineland scores were collected at baseline (T1), 3 (T2), 10 (T3), and 15 (T4) years later. A group‐based method...

Clusters showing significant age-related decreases in gyrification for all the participants. TYP, AS-SOD and AS-NoSOD groups are pooled in one group here. Reported are (from left to right) cluster number (#), cluster area size in mm2 and in vertices, the maximum vertex and its MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates, the Cluster-Wise P-va...

Background Behavioral, cognitive and functional particularities in autism differ according to autism subgroups and might be associated with domain-specific cognitive strengths. It is unknown whether structural changes support this specialization. We investigated the link between cortical folding, its maturation and cognitive strengths in autism sub...

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Objective: Autism and certain associated behaviors including self-injurious behaviors (SIB) and atypical pain reactivity have been hypothesized to result from excessive opioid activity. The objective of this study was to examine the relationships between SIB, pain reactivity, and β-endorphin levels in autism. Methods: Study participants were rec...

Background: Psychoactive medications are commonly prescribed to autistic individuals, but little is known about how their use changes after diagnosis. Objectives: This study describes the use of psychoactive drugs in children and young adults newly diagnosed with autism spectrum, between the year before and up to 5 years after diagnosis. Method...

Previous studies have suggested audiovisual multisensory integration (MSI) may be atypical in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, much of the research having found an alteration in MSI in ASD involved socio-communicative stimuli. The goal of the current study was to investigate MSI abilities in ASD using lower-level stimuli that are not socio-...

Background The distinction between autism and Asperger syndrome has been abandoned in the DSM-5. However, this clinical categorization largely overlaps with the presence or absence of a speech onset delay which is associated with clinical, cognitive, and neural differences. It is unknown whether these different speech development pathways and assoc...

Early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) and its recent variant, naturalist developmental behavioral intervention (NDBI) aim to increase socialization and communication, and to decrease repetitive and challenging behaviors in preschool age autistic children. These behaviorist techniques are based on the precocity and intensity of the interven...

Background: An often-repeated but questionable claim about repetitive behaviors in autism is that they interfere with learning. More specifically, increased repetitive behaviors are thought to reduce exploration of the environment in autistic children, thus reducing opportunities for learning (Pierce & Courchesne E., 2001; Sasson et al., 2008, for...

Background: A DSM-5 autism spectrum diagnosis requires specifying the co-occurrence of language impairment. Considering the gap between receptive and expressive language skills, the APA recommends a separate assessment of these subdomains (APA, 2013). Contrary to typically developing (TD) children, receptive language is usually lower than expressiv...

Background: Young autistic children are claimed to have excessively negative and dysregulated emotions, with pervasively reduced positive affect (Zwaigenbaum et al., 2013; Hirschler-Guttenberg et al., 2015). However, in preliminary data from the Montreal Stimulating Play Situation (MSPS; Jacques et al., 2015), young autistic and age-matched typical...

Hyperlexia is defined as the co-occurrence of advanced reading skills relative to comprehension skills or general intelligence, the early acquisition of reading skills without explicit teaching, and a strong orientation toward written material, generally in the context of a neurodevelopmental disorder. In this systematic review of cases (N=82) and...

Background: The autism spectrum (AS) is a multifaceted neurodevelopmental variant associated with lifelong challenges. Despite the relevant importance of identifying AS in adults for epidemiological, public health, and quality of life issues, the measurement properties of the tools currently used to screen and diagnose adults without intellectual...

Atypical face perception has been associated with the socio-communicative difficulties that characterize autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Growing evidence, however, suggests that a widespread impairment in face perception is not as common as once thought. One important issue arising with the interpretation of this literature is the relationship betw...

Mimetic desire (MD), the spontaneous propensity to pursue goals that others pursue, is a case of social influence that is believed to shape preferences. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is defined by both atypical interests and altered social interaction. We investigated whether MD is lower in adults with ASD compared to typically developed adults an...

Some individuals with autism spectrum (AS) perform better on visual reasoning tasks than would be predicted by their general cognitive performance. In individuals with AS, mechanisms in the brain's visual area that underlie visual processing play a more prominent role in visual reasoning tasks than they do in normal individuals. In addition, increa...

This dataset contains individual z-transformed imaginary coherence values between a seed sensor (left occipital) and 146 other sensors for the alpha, beta and gamma bands (XLSX). (XLSX)

The performance (raw score) on each Kaufman Assessment Battery (K-ABC) subtest. The error bars represent 1 standard deviation. An unpaired t-test revealed significantly lower performance in AS children compared to TD children in one subtest (?Face Recognition?). *P<0.05. (DOCX) (DOCX)

Grand averaged absolute power values from 147 channels. MEG spectra were calculated using a fast Fourier transform (FFT) with a spectral resolution of 0.5 Hz in all children to show the range of alpha rhythms in the participants. The absolute power values were averaged over the 147 sensors, and the overall value was the grand average of all the sub...