Hindbrain modules differentially transform activity of single collicular neurons to coordinate movements.

Seemingly simple behaviors such as swatting a mosquito or glancing at a signpost involve the precise coordination of multiple body parts. Neural control of coordinated movements is widely thought to entail transforming a desired overall displacement into displacements for each body part. Here we reveal a different logic implemented in the mouse gaze system. Stimulating superior colliculus (SC) elicits head movements with stereotyped displacements but eye movements with stereotyped endpoints. This is achieved by individual SC neurons whose branched axons innervate modules in medulla and pons that drive head movements with stereotyped displacements and eye movements with stereotyped endpoints, respectively. Thus, single neurons specify a mixture of endpoints and displacements for different body parts, not overall displacement, with displacements for different body parts computed at distinct anatomical stages. Our study establishes an approach for unraveling motor hierarchies and identifies a logic for coordinating movements and the resulting pose.

Individual gaze shapes diverging neural representations.

Complex visual stimuli evoke diverse patterns of gaze, but previous research suggests that their neural representations are shared across brains. Here, we used hyperalignment to compare visual responses between observers viewing identical stimuli. We find that individual eye movements enhance cortical visual responses but also lead to representational divergence. Pairwise differences in the spatial distribution of gaze and in semantic salience predict pairwise representational divergence in V1 and inferior temporal cortex, respectively. This suggests that individual gaze sculpts individual visual worlds.

Individual differences in human gaze behavior generalize from faces to objects.

Individuals differ in where they fixate on a face, with some looking closer to the eyes while others prefer the mouth region. These individual biases are highly robust, generalize from the lab to the outside world, and have been associated with social cognition and associated disorders. However, it is unclear, whether these biases are specific to faces or influenced by domain-general mechanisms of vision. Here, we juxtaposed these hypotheses by testing whether individual face fixation biases generalize to inanimate objects. We analyzed >1.8 million fixations toward faces and objects in complex natural scenes from 405 participants tested in multiple labs. Consistent interindividual differences in fixation positions were highly inter-correlated across faces and objects in all samples. Observers who fixated closer to the eye region also fixated higher on inanimate objects and vice versa. Furthermore, the inter-individual spread of fixation positions scaled with target size in precisely the same, non-linear manner for faces and objects. These findings contradict a purely domain-specific account of individual face gaze. Instead, they suggest significant domain-general contributions to the individual way we look at faces, a finding with potential relevance for basic vision, face perception, social cognition, and associated clinical conditions.

Encoding of dynamic facial information in the middle dorsal face area.

Faces in motion reveal a plethora of information through visual dynamics. Faces can move in complex patterns while transforming facial shape, e.g., during the generation of different emotional expressions. While motion and shape processing have been studied extensively in separate research enterprises, much less is known about their conjunction during biological motion. Here, we took advantage of the discovery in brain-imaging studies of an area in the dorsal portion of the macaque monkey superior temporal sulcus (STS), the middle dorsal face area (MD), with selectivity for naturalistic face motion. To gain mechanistic insights into the coding of facial motion, we recorded single-unit activity from MD, testing whether and how MD cells encode face motion. The MD population was highly sensitive to naturalistic facial motion and facial shape. Some MD cells responded only to the conjunction of facial shape and motion, others were selective for facial shape even without movement, and yet others were suppressed by facial motion. We found that this heterogeneous MD population transforms face motion into a higher dimensional activity space, a representation that would allow for high sensitivity to relevant small-scale movements. Indeed, we show that many MD cells carry such sensitivity for eye movements. We further found that MD cells encode motion of head, mouth, and eyes in a separable manner, requiring the use of multiple reference frames. Thus, MD is a bona fide face-motion area that uses highly heterogeneous cell populations to create codes capturing even complex facial motion trajectories.

Mixed Selectivity Coding of Content-Temporal Detail by Dorsomedial Posterior Parietal Neurons.

The dorsomedial posterior parietal cortex (dmPPC) is part of a higher-cognition network implicated in elaborate processes underpinning memory formation, recollection, episode reconstruction, and temporal information processing. Neural coding for complex episodic processing is however under-documented. Here, we recorded extracellular neural activities from three male rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and revealed a set of neural codes of "neuroethogram" in the primate parietal cortex. Analyzing neural responses in macaque dmPPC to naturalistic videos, we discovered several groups of neurons that are sensitive to different categories of ethogram items, low-level sensory features, and saccadic eye movement. We also discovered that the processing of category and feature information by these neurons is sustained by the accumulation of temporal information over a long timescale of up to 30 s, corroborating its reported long temporal receptive windows. We performed an additional behavioral experiment with additional two male rhesus macaques and found that saccade-related activities could not account for the mixed neuronal responses elicited by the video stimuli. We further observed monkeys' scan paths and gaze consistency are modulated by video content. Taken altogether, these neural findings explain how dmPPC weaves fabrics of ongoing experiences together in real time. The high dimensionality of neural representations should motivate us to shift the focus of attention from pure selectivity neurons to mixed selectivity neurons, especially in increasingly complex naturalistic task designs.

Gaze following requires early visual experience.

Gaze understanding­a suggested precursor for understanding others' intentions­requires recovery of gaze direction from the observed person's head and eye position. This challenging computation is naturally acquired at infancy without explicit external guidance, but can it be learned later if vision is extremely poor throughout early childhood? We addressed this question by studying gaze following in Ethiopian patients with early bilateral congenital cataracts diagnosed and treated by us only at late childhood. This sight restoration provided a unique opportunity to directly address basic issues on the roles of "nature" and "nurture" in development, as it caused a selective perturbation to the natural process, eliminating some gaze-direction cues while leaving others still available. Following surgery, the patients' visual acuity typically improved substantially, allowing discrimination of pupil position in the eye. Yet, the patients failed to show eye gaze-following effects and fixated less than controls on the eyes­two spontaneous behaviors typically seen in controls. Our model for unsupervised learning of gaze direction explains how head-based gaze following can develop under severe image blur, resembling preoperative conditions. It also suggests why, despite acquiring sufficient resolution to extract eye position, automatic eye gaze following is not established after surgery due to lack of detailed early visual experience. We suggest that visual skills acquired in infancy in an unsupervised manner will be difficult or impossible to acquire when internal guidance is no longer available, even when sufficient image resolution for the task is restored. This creates fundamental barriers to spontaneous vision recovery following prolonged deprivation in early age.

The Timing of Gaze Direction Perception: ERP Decoding and Task Modulation.

Distinguishing the direction of another person's eye gaze is extremely important in everyday social interaction, as it provides critical information about people's attention and, therefore, intentions. The temporal dynamics of gaze processing have been investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded with electroencephalography (EEG). However, the moment at which our brain distinguishes the gaze direction (GD), irrespectively of other facial cues, remains unclear. To solve this question, the present study aimed to investigate the time course of gaze direction processing, using an ERP decoding approach, based on the combination of a support vector machine and error-correcting output codes. We recorded EEG in young healthy subjects, 32 of them performing GD detection and 34 conducting face orientation tasks. Both tasks presented 3D realistic faces with five different head and gaze orientations each: 30°, 15° to the left or right, and 0°. While the classical ERP analyses did not show clear GD effects, ERP decoding analyses revealed that discrimination of GD, irrespective of head orientation, started at 140 ms in the GD task and at 120 ms in the face orientation task. GD decoding accuracy was higher in the GD task than in the face orientation task and was the highest for the direct gaze in both tasks. These findings suggest that the decoding of brain patterns is modified by task relevance, which changes the latency and the accuracy of GD decoding.

Influence of gaze, vision, and memory on hand kinematics in a placement task.

People usually reach for objects to place them in some position and orientation, but the placement component of this sequence is often ignored. For example, reaches are influenced by gaze position, visual feedback, and memory delays, but their influence on object placement is unclear. Here, we tested these factors in a task where participants placed and oriented a trapezoidal block against two-dimensional (2-D) visual templates displayed on a frontally located computer screen. In experiment 1, participants matched the block to three possible orientations: 0° (horizontal), +45° and -45°, with gaze fixated 10° to the left/right. The hand and template either remained illuminated (closed-loop), or visual feedback was removed (open-loop). Here, hand location consistently overshot the template relative to gaze, especially in the open-loop task; likewise, orientation was influenced by gaze position (depending on template orientation and visual feedback). In experiment 2, a memory delay was added, and participants sometimes performed saccades (toward, away from, or across the template). In this task, the influence of gaze on orientation vanished, but location errors were influenced by both template orientation and final gaze position. Contrary to our expectations, the previous saccade metrics also impacted placement overshoot. Overall, hand orientation was influenced by template orientation in a nonlinear fashion. These results demonstrate interactions between gaze and orientation signals in the planning and execution of hand placement and suggest different neural mechanisms for closed-loop, open-loop, and memory delay placement.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Eye-hand coordination studies usually focus on object acquisition, but placement is equally important. We investigated how gaze position influences object placement toward a 2-D template with different levels of visual feedback. Like reach, placement overestimated goal location relative to gaze and was influenced by previous saccade metrics. Gaze also modulated hand orientation, depending on template orientation and level of visual feedback. Gaze influence was feedback-dependent, with location errors having no significant effect after a memory delay.

A computational account of conflict processing during mental imagery.

Previous studies examining conflict processing within the context of a color-word Stroop task have focused on both stimulus and response conflicts. However, it has been unclear whether conflict can emerge independently of stimulus conflict. In this study, a novel arrow-gaze mental-rotation Stroop task was introduced to explore the interplay between conflict processing and mental rotation. A modelling approach was utilized to provide a process-level account of the findings. The results of our Stroop task indicate that conflict can emerge from mental rotation in the absence of stimulus conflict. The strength of this imagery conflict effect decreases and even reverses as mental rotation angles increase. Additionally, it was observed that participants responded more quickly and with greater accuracy to small rather than large face orientations. A comparison of three conflict diffusion models-the diffusion model for conflict tasks (DMC), the dual-stage two-phase model (DSTP), and the shrinking spotlight model (SSP)-yielded consistent support for the DSTP over the DMC and SSP in the majority of instances. The DSTP account of the experimental results revealed an increased nondecision time with increasing mental rotation, a reduction in interference from incompatible stimuli, and an improved drift rate in response selection phase, which suggests enhanced cognitive control. The findings from the model-based analysis provide evidence for a novel interaction between cognitive control and mental rotation.

Can I see it in the eyes? An investigation of freezing-like motion patterns in response to avoidable threat.

Freezing is one of the most extensively studied defensive behaviors in rodents. Both reduced body and gaze movements during anticipation of threat also occur in humans and have been discussed as translational indicators of freezing but their relationship remains unclear. We thus set out to elucidate body and eye movements and concomitant autonomic dynamics in anticipation of avoidable threat. Specifically, 50 participants viewed naturalistic pictures that were preceded by a colored fixation cross, signaling them whether to expect an inevitable (shock), no (safety), or a potential shock (flight) that could be avoided by a quick button press. Body sway, eye movements, the heart rate and skin conductance were recorded. We replicated previously described reductions in body sway, gaze dispersion, and the heart rate, and a skin conductance increase in flight trials. Stronger reductions in gaze but not in body sway predicted faster motor reactions on a trial-wise basis, highlighting their functional role in action preparation. We failed to find a trait-like relationship between body and gaze movements across participants, but their temporal profiles were positively related within individuals, suggesting that both metrics partly reflect the same construct. However, future research is desirable to assess these response patterns in naturalistic environments. A more ethological examination of different movement dynamics upon threat would not only warrant better comparability between rodent and human research but also help determine whether and how eye-tracking could be implemented as a proxy for fear-related movements in restricted brain imaging environments.

Temporal dynamics of ocular torsion and vertical vergence during visual, vestibular, and visuovestibular rotations.

Ocular torsion and vertical divergence reflect the brain's sensorimotor integration of motion through the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and the optokinetic reflex (OKR) to roll rotations. Torsion and vergence however express different response patterns depending on several motion variables, but research on their temporal dynamics remains limited. This study investigated the onset times of ocular torsion (OT) and vertical vergence (VV) during visual, vestibular, and visuovestibular motion, as well as their relative decay rates following prolonged optokinetic stimulations. Temporal characteristics were retrieved from three separate investigations where the level of visual clutter and acceleration were controlled. Video eye-tracking was used to retrieve the eye-movement parameters from a total of 41 healthy participants across all trials. Ocular torsion consistently initiated earlier than vertical vergence, particularly evident under intensified visual information density, and higher clutter levels were associated with more balanced decay rates. Additionally, stimulation modality and accelerations affected the onsets of both eye movements, with visuovestibular motion triggering earlier responses compared to vestibular motion, and increased accelerations leading to earlier onsets for both movements. The present study showed that joint visuovestibular responses produced more rapid onsets, indicating a synergetic sensorimotor process. It also showed that visual content acted as a fusional force during the decay period, and imposed greater influence over the torsional onset compared to vergence. Acceleration, by contrast, did not affect the temporal relationship between the two eye movements. Altogether, these findings provide insights into the sensorimotor integration of the vestibulo-ocular and optokinetic reflex arcs.

The center of a face catches the eye in face perception.

Using the "Don't look" (DL) paradigm, wherein participants are asked not to look at a specific feature (i.e., eye, nose, and mouth), we previously documented that Easterners struggled to completely avoid fixating on the eyes and nose. Their underlying mechanisms for attractiveness may differ because the fixations on the eyes were triggered only reflexively, whereas fixations on the nose were consistently elicited. In this study, we predominantly focused on the nose, where the center-of-gravity (CoG) effect, which refers to a person's tendency to look near an object's CoG, could be confounded. Full-frontal and mid-profile faces were used because the latter's CoG did not correspond to the nose location. Although we hypothesized that these two effects are independent, the results indicated that, in addition to the successful tracing of previous studies, the CoG effect explains the nose-attracting effect. This study not only reveals this explanation but also raises a question regarding the CoG effect on Eastern participants.

The slow emergence of gaze- and point-following: A longitudinal study of infants from 4 to 12 months.

Acquisition of visual attention-following skills, notably gaze- and point-following, contributes to infants' ability to share attention with caregivers, which in turn contributes to social learning and communication. However, the development of gaze- and point-following in the first 18 months remains controversial, in part because of different testing protocols and standards. To address this, we longitudinally tested N = 43 low-risk, North American middle-class infants' tendency to follow gaze direction, pointing gestures, and gaze-and-point combinations. Infants were tested monthly from 4 to 12 months of age. To control motivational differences, infants were taught to expect contingent reward videos in the target locations. No-cue trials were included to estimate spontaneous target fixation rates. A comparison sample (N = 23) was tested at 9 and 12 months to estimate practice effects. Results showed gradual increases in both gaze- and point-following starting around 7 months, and modest month-to-month individual stability from 8 to 12 months. However, attention-following did not exceed chance levels until after 6 months. Infants rarely followed cues to locations behind them, even at 12 months. Infants followed combined gaze-and-point cues more than gaze alone, and followed points at intermediate levels (not reliably different from the other cues). The comparison group's results showed that practice effects did not explain the age-related increase in attention-following. The results corroborate and extend previous findings that North American middle-class infants' attention-following in controlled laboratory settings increases slowly and incrementally between 6 and 12 months of age. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: A longitudinal experimental study documented the emergence and developmental trajectories of North American middle-class infants' visual attention-following skills, including gaze-following, point-following, and gaze-and-point-following. A new paradigm controlled for factors including motivation, attentiveness, and visual-search baserates. Motor development was ruled out as a predictor or limiter of the emergence of attention-following. Infants did not follow attention reliably until after 6 months, and following increased slowly from 7 to 12 months. Infants' individual trajectories showed modest month-to-month stability from 8 to 12 months of age.

Variation in gaze following across the life span: A process-level perspective.

Following eye gaze is fundamental for many social-cognitive abilities, for example, when judging what another agent can or cannot know. While the emergence of gaze following has been thoroughly studied on a group level, we know little about (a) the developmental trajectory beyond infancy and (b) the sources of individual differences. In Study 1, we examined gaze following across the lifespan (N = 478 3- to 19-year-olds from Leipzig, Germany; and N = 240 20- to 80-year-old international, remotely tested adults). We found a steep performance improvement during preschool years, in which children became more precise in locating the attentional focus of an agent. Precision levels then stayed comparably stable throughout adulthood with a minor decline toward old age. In Study 2, we formalized the process of gaze following in a computational cognitive model that allowed us to conceptualize individual differences in a psychologically meaningful way (N = 60 3- to 5-year-olds, 50 adults). According to our model, participants estimate pupil angles with varying levels of precision based on observing the pupil location within the agent's eyes. In Study 3, we empirically tested how gaze following relates to vector following in non-social settings and perspective-taking abilities (N = 102 4- to 5-year-olds). We found that gaze following is associated with both of these abilities but less so with other Theory of Mind tasks. This work illustrates how the combination of reliable measurement instruments and formal theoretical models allows us to explore the in(ter)dependence of core social-cognitive processes in greater detail. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Gaze following develops beyond infancy. The highest precision levels in localizing attentional foci are reached in young adulthood with a slight decrease towards old age. We present a computational model that describes gaze following as a process of estimating pupil angles and the corresponding gaze vectors. The model explains individual differences and recovers signature patterns in the data. To estimate the relation between gaze- and vector following, we designed a non-social vector following task. We found substantial correlations between gaze following and vector following, as well as Level 2 perspective-taking. Other Theory of Mind tasks did not correlate.

Effects of Inversion and Fixation Location on the Processing of Face and House Stimuli - A Mass Univariate Analysis.

Most Event Related Potential studies investigating the time course of visual processing have focused mainly on the N170 component. Stimulus orientation affects the N170 amplitude for faces but not for objects, a finding interpreted as reflecting holistic/configural processing for faces and featural processing for objects. Furthermore, while recent studies suggest where on the face people fixate impacts the N170, fixation location effects have not been investigated in objects. A data-driven mass univariate analysis (all time points and electrodes) was used to investigate the time course of inversion and fixation location effects on the neural processing of faces and houses. Strong and widespread orientation effects were found for both faces and houses, from 100-350ms post-stimulus onset, including P1 and N170 components, and later, a finding arguing against a lack of holistic processing for houses. While no clear fixation effect was found for houses, fixation location strongly impacted face processing early, reflecting retinotopic mapping around the C2 and P1 components, and during the N170-P2 interval. Face inversion effects were also largest for nasion fixation around 120ms. The results support the view that facial feature integration (1) depends on which feature is being fixated and where the other features are situated in the visual field, (2) occurs maximally during the P1-N170 interval when fixation is on the nasion and (3) continues past 200ms, suggesting the N170 peak, where weak effects were found, might be an inflexion point between processes rather than the end of a feature integration into a whole process.

Novelty preference assessed by eye tracking: A sensitive measure of impaired recognition memory in epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE: Epilepsy patients often report memory deficits despite normal objective testing, suggesting that available measures are insensitive or that non-mnemonic factors are involved. The Visual Paired Comparison Task (VPCT) assesses novelty preference, the tendency to fixate on novel images rather than previously viewed items, requiring recognition memory for the "old" images. As novelty preference is a sensitive measure of hippocampal-dependent memory function, we predicted impaired VPCT performance in epilepsy patients compared to healthy controls. METHODS: We assessed 26 healthy adult controls and 31 epilepsy patients (16 focal-onset, 13 generalized-onset, 2 unknown-onset) with the VPCT using delays of 2 or 30 s between encoding and recognition. Fifteen healthy controls and 17 epilepsy patients (10 focal-onset, 5 generalized-onset, 2 unknown-onset) completed the task at 2-, 5-, and 30-minute delays. Subjects also performed standard memory measures, including the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) Paragraph Test, California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition (CVLT-II), and Brief Visual Memory Test-Revised (BVMT-R). RESULTS: The epilepsy group was high functioning, with greater estimated IQ (p = 0.041), greater years of education (p = 0.034), and higher BVMT-R scores (p = 0.024) compared to controls. Both the control group and epilepsy cohort, as well as focal- and generalized-onset subgroups, had intact novelty preference at the 2- and 30-second delays (p-values ≤ 0.001) and declined at 30 min (p-values > 0.05). Only the epilepsy patients had early declines at 2- and 5-minute delays (controls with intact novelty preference at p = 0.003 and p ≤ 0.001, respectively; epilepsy groups' p-values > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Memory for the "old" items decayed more rapidly in overall, focal-onset, and generalized-onset epilepsy groups. The VPCT detected deficits while standard memory measures were largely intact, suggesting that the VPCT may be a more sensitive measure of temporal lobe memory function than standard neuropsychological batteries.

Interacting with autistic virtual characters: intrapersonal synchrony of nonverbal behavior affects participants' perception.

Temporal coordination of communicative behavior is not only located between but also within interaction partners (e.g., gaze and gestures). This intrapersonal synchrony (IaPS) is assumed to constitute interpersonal alignment. Studies show systematic variations in IaPS in individuals with autism, which may affect the degree of interpersonal temporal coordination. In the current study, we reversed the approach and mapped the measured nonverbal behavior of interactants with and without ASD from a previous study onto virtual characters to study the effects of the differential IaPS on observers (N = 68), both with and without ASD (crossed design). During a communication task with both characters, who indicated targets with gaze and delayed pointing gestures, we measured response times, gaze behavior, and post hoc impression formation. Results show that character behavior indicative of ASD resulted in overall enlarged decoding times in observers and this effect was even pronounced in observers with ASD. A classification of observer's gaze types indicated differentiated decoding strategies. Whereas non-autistic observers presented with a rather consistent eyes-focused strategy associated with efficient and fast responses, observers with ASD presented with highly variable decoding strategies. In contrast to communication efficiency, impression formation was not influenced by IaPS. The results underline the importance of timing differences in both production and perception processes during multimodal nonverbal communication in interactants with and without ASD. In essence, the current findings locate the manifestation of reduced reciprocity in autism not merely in the person, but in the interactional dynamics of dyads.

Frequency-specific gaze modulation of emotional face processing in the human amygdala.

Determining the social significance of emotional face expression is of major importance for adaptive behavior, and gaze direction provides critical information in this process. The amygdala is implicated in both emotion and gaze processing, but how and when it integrates expression and gaze cues remains unresolved. We tackled this question using intracranial electroencephalography in epileptic patients to assess both amygdala (n = 12) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC; n = 11) time-frequency evoked responses to faces with different emotional expressions and different gaze directions. As predicted, self-relevant threat signals (averted fearful and directed angry faces) elicited stronger amygdala activity than self-irrelevant threat (directed fearful and averted angry faces). Fear effects started at early latencies in both amygdala and OFC (~110 and 160 ms, respectively), while gaze direction effects and their interaction with emotion occurred at later latencies. Critically, the amygdala showed differential gamma band increases to fearful averted gaze (starting ~550 ms) and to angry directed gaze (~470 ms). Moreover, when comparing the 2 self-relevant threat conditions among them, we found higher gamma amygdala activity for averted fearful faces and higher beta OFC activity for angry directed faces. Together, these results reveal for the first time frequency-specific effects of emotion and gaze on amygdala and OFC neural activity.

Diverse effects of gaze direction on heading perception in humans.

Gaze change can misalign spatial reference frames encoding visual and vestibular signals in cortex, which may affect the heading discrimination. Here, by systematically manipulating the eye-in-head and head-on-body positions to change the gaze direction of subjects, the performance of heading discrimination was tested with visual, vestibular, and combined stimuli in a reaction-time task in which the reaction time is under the control of subjects. We found the gaze change induced substantial biases in perceived heading, increased the threshold of discrimination and reaction time of subjects in all stimulus conditions. For the visual stimulus, the gaze effects were induced by changing the eye-in-world position, and the perceived heading was biased in the opposite direction of gaze. In contrast, the vestibular gaze effects were induced by changing the eye-in-head position, and the perceived heading was biased in the same direction of gaze. Although the bias was reduced when the visual and vestibular stimuli were combined, integration of the 2 signals substantially deviated from predictions of an extended diffusion model that accumulates evidence optimally over time and across sensory modalities. These findings reveal diverse gaze effects on the heading discrimination and emphasize that the transformation of spatial reference frames may underlie the effects.

Brief intensive social gaze training reorganizes functional brain connectivity in boys with fragile X syndrome.

Boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS), the leading known genetic cause of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), demonstrate significant impairments in social gaze and associated weaknesses in communication, social interaction, and other areas of adaptive functioning. Little is known, however, concerning the impact of behavioral treatments for these behaviors on functional brain connectivity in this population. As part of a larger study, boys with FXS (mean age 13.23 ± 2.31 years) and comparison boys with ASD (mean age 12.15 ± 2.76 years) received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans prior to and following social gaze training administered by a trained behavior therapist in our laboratory. Network-agnostic connectome-based predictive modeling of pretreatment resting-state functional connectivity data revealed a set of positive (FXS > ASD) and negative (FXS < ASD) edges that differentiated the groups significantly and consistently across all folds of cross-validation. Following administration of the brief training, the FXS and ASD groups demonstrated reorganization of connectivity differences. The divergence in the spatial pattern of reorganization response, based on functional connectivity differences pretreatment, suggests a unique pattern of response to treatment in the FXS and ASD groups. These results provide further support for implementing targeted behavioral treatments to ameliorate syndrome-specific behavioral features in FXS.