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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2012 Mar 9.
Published in final edited form as: J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2008 Nov;14(6):933–946. doi: 10.1017/S1355617708081381

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

Comparison of the pathway D-min in autism and control groups. a: The left amygdalo-fusiform (AF), left hippocampo-fusiform (HF), and right AF pathways show trends of an increased D-min in the autism group compared with controls (e.g., p =.134 unpaired and .089 paired for the left HF pathway). In contrast, the right HF shows a trend of a decreased D-min in the autism group compared with controls. b: Analysis of laterality (see Methods) shows a strong change in laterality in the HF pathway system (p= .0040 unpaired, .0017 paired) with a loss of lateralization, where laterality ranges from +100% (full left-lateralization) to 0 (no lateralization) to −100% (full right-lateralization). Because two pathway systems (HF and AF) were analyzed for laterality, the Bonferroni-corrected p-value threshold was .05/2 = .025 (to conservatively correct for multiple comparisons). c: Normalization by the whole-brain D-min value reveals that the laterality shift in (b) is predominantly due to a specific decrease in D-min in the right HF pathway in the autism group, compared with controls (p = .038 unpaired and .014 paired, where the corrected p-value threshold is 0 .025 because two HF pathways are tested). This normalization effectively normalizes the pathway measurement by the average whole-brain value for white matter that has an anisotropy above the track-ability threshold. Because the whole-brain D-min in the autism group is increased compared with controls (see text), the decreased D-min in the right HF pathway in (a) is accentuated in (c). In contrast, the trend of increased D-min in the three other pathways in the autism group compared with controls in (a) is suppressed in (c), because the D-min increase in these three pathways is similar to the overall whole-brain increase in D-min. Error bars are ±1SEM. The p values shown in the Fig. are for unpaired t tests (with p values for paired comparisons given in parentheses).