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Postdoctorial Fellowship Award Winner 

Investigating Neuro-oscillatory Alpha Dynamics in Autistic Children at Rest and at Play

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Theo Vanneau¹ (), Chloe Brittenham¹, Michael Quiquempoix^2,3, John. J Foxe^1,4, Sophie Molholm^1,4; ¹The Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, Departments of Pediatrics & Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York 10461, USA, ²Institut de Recherche Biomédicale des Armées (IRBA), 91223 Brétigny sur Orge, France, ³URP 7330 VIFASOM, Université Paris Cité, Hôtel Dieu, Paris, France, ⁴The Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, The Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York 14642, USA

Atypical sensory experiences are common in autistic children, ranging from hyper- to hypo-responsivity—and are often linked to feelings of sensory overload. A candidate neural mechanism involves alpha oscillations (∼7–13 Hz), which regulate cortical excitability: lower alpha facilitates external sampling, whereas higher alpha promotes suppression of irrelevant input and supports internal processing. We examined alpha dynamics in children across rest and simple attentional tasks, testing whether group differences emerge more clearly in burst-resolved metrics than in averages. Three cohorts participated: non-autistic (NA), autistic (AU), and unaffected siblings (SIB). EEG analyses combined (i) periodic/aperiodic separation (FOOOF/PSD) to isolate narrowband alpha from 1/f background and (ii) burst detection (eBOSC) to quantify abundance (time in alpha), amplitude, and duration. We modeled effects using linear mixed models across Group × Paradigm × Cluster, and related alpha features to clinical measures (FSIQ, Vineland, SRS). Topographically, all groups showed canonical parieto-occipital alpha at rest. Average alpha power (absolute/relative) was broadly similar between groups; however, alpha abundance was reduced in ASD, most prominently in a left parietal cluster. During tasks, modulation (task–rest) of periodic alpha power and alpha abundance was attenuated in ASD relative to TD and SIB, indicating reduced adaptive adjustment of excitability. These findings suggest that burst-resolved, aperiodic-controlled alpha metrics and how they modulate with context may sharpen biomarkers of sensory–attentional regulation and highlight alpha periodic power and abundance as candidate targets for neuromodulation to enhance adaptive gating in autism.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Other