Synaptic density imaging associates with performance but not self-report in autism
- 1Center for Brain and Mind Health, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Abstract
Autism is a common neurodevelopmental condition with considerable between-person variability and unknown biological etiology. Diagnosis of autism in adults relies on measurement of performance (e.g., clinician rating of social behavior, standardized assessment of cognition) and self-report of autism features. Our prior work revealed a strong relationship between clinician ratings of social function in autism and in vivo measures of synaptic density as measured by [11C]UCB-J PET (Matuskey et al., 2025). However, it is not understood how the measured aspects of the autism phenotype index underlying biology. Here, in a sample of 12 autistic adults, we address this question by relating synaptic density imaging to a range of performance measures, such as cognition and face recognition, in contrast to self-report measures. Our results identify a dissociation between these measurement types in that synaptic density correlates strongly with measures of performance but shows virtually no relationship with self-report. These findings suggest that, while self-report and performance measures share variance in characterizing phenotypes in autism, they diverge when mapping onto the underlying biology. Results suggest that higher synaptic density may index a general mechanism that facilitates social and cognitive performance across a range of tasks. These data also indicate that performance and self-report measures are not interchangeable in capturing brain-behavior correspondences in autism, a finding that can guide measure selection in future biomarker studies and clinical research.
Related
- Systems-level imaging reveals assembly and synaptic delivery of a multi-organelle ensemble during T cell killing
- Imaging and recording of synaptic zinc in the brain by covalent chemistry-based semisynthetic biosensors.
- Neurite Complexity and Plasticity Markers Track Synaptic Vesicle Density in the Living Human Brain: A Multimodal PET-MRI-EEG Study
- Application of spectroscopic and multispectral imaging technologies on the assessment of ready-to-eat pineapple quality: A performance evaluation study of machine learning models generated from two commercial data analytics tools
- A high-throughput UAV millimetric imaging pipeline for plant density phenotyping reveals high heritability in wheat-pea sole crops and intercrops.
BibTeX
@misc{naples2026synaptic,
title = {{Synaptic density imaging associates with performance but not self-report in autism}},
author = {A. J. Naples and S. Cayir and C. cukar-capizzi and J. M. Wolf and J. E. Mcclelland and E. C. Robertson and S. S. Sawant and D. Matuskey and J. McPartland},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.05.755105},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.05.755105v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Synaptic density imaging associates with performance but not self-report in autism
AU - A. J. Naples
AU - S. Cayir
AU - C. cukar-capizzi
AU - J. M. Wolf
AU - J. E. Mcclelland
AU - E. C. Robertson
AU - S. S. Sawant
AU - D. Matuskey
AU - J. McPartland
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/05
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.05.755105
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.05.755105v1
AB - Autism is a common neurodevelopmental condition with considerable between-person variability and unknown biological etiology. Diagnosis of autism in adults relies on measurement of performance (e.g., clinician rating of social behavior, standardized assessment of cognition) and self-report of autism features. Our prior work revealed a strong relationship between clinician ratings of social function in autism and in vivo measures of synaptic density as measured by [11C]UCB-J PET (Matuskey et al., 2025). However, it is not understood how the measured aspects of the autism phenotype index underlying biology. Here, in a sample of 12 autistic adults, we address this question by relating synaptic density imaging to a range of performance measures, such as cognition and face recognition, in contrast to self-report measures. Our results identify a dissociation between these measurement types in that synaptic density correlates strongly with measures of performance but shows virtually no relationship with self-report. These findings suggest that, while self-report and performance measures share variance in characterizing phenotypes in autism, they diverge when mapping onto the underlying biology. Results suggest that higher synaptic density may index a general mechanism that facilitates social and cognitive performance across a range of tasks. These data also indicate that performance and self-report measures are not interchangeable in capturing brain-behavior correspondences in autism, a finding that can guide measure selection in future biomarker studies and clinical research.
ER -