Autism-like atypical face processing in Shank3 mutant dogs

Atypical face processing is a neurocognitive basis of social deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a candidate cognitive marker for the disease. Although hundreds of risk genes have been identified in ASD, it remains unclear whether mutations in a specific gene may cause ASD-like atypical face processing. Dogs have acquired exquisite face processing abilities during domestication and may serve as an effective animal model for studying genetic associations of ASD-like atypical face processing. Here, we showed that dogs with Shank3 mutations exhibited behavioral and attentional avoidance of faces, contrasting with wild-type controls. Moreover, neural responses specific to faces (versus objects) recorded from the electrodes over the temporal cortex were significantly decreased and delayed in Shank3 mutants compared to wild-type controls. Cortical responses in the frontal/parietal region underlying categorization of faces by species/breeds were reduced in S..., Subjects
Twenty-three WT (beagles) from Sinogene Ltd (Beijing, China) and fifteen Shank3 mutant dogs (beagles) were tested in this study. The mean age did not differ significantly between WT controls and Shank3 mutants (WT, 19.3 Â± 1.33 months of age (mean ± SEM); Mutants, 24.5 ± 2.75 months of age, U = 125.5, P = 0.164, see Tables S1 and S2 for detailed information about the subjects in each experiment). Four WT controls (80, 201138, 210755, 201115) and three Shank3 mutants (201111, 201112, 201141) were tested in a previous behavioral study of dog-human interactions (20). Two Shank3 mutants (190203, 190604) were tested in an ECoG study which required the subjects to passively listen to pure sinusoidal tones (27). None of these studies involved any training with food or employed stimuli of animal/human faces or houses. Three dogs tested in this work were littermates (i.e., WT(201115) and Shank3 mutants (201111 and 201112)). WT(201115) par..., , # Autism-like atypical face processing in Shank3 mutant dogs

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ht76hdrsp ](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ht76hdrsp)

## Description of the data and file structure

* Files of ‘beagle&house, beagle&husky, car&house, dog&chimp, inverted beagle&inverted house’ are the data of behavioral preference data.

- Each file contains the number of times and the proportion that wild-type dogs and mutant dogs respectively choose the corresponding category of pictures.

* The file names that include \"ECoG\" are for the data of electrophysiological experiments. Different sheets in each file represent the results of different electroencephalographic components in the corresponding experiments. This data is mainly used for variance analysis.

- The files with names including \"eye-tracking\" contain data from our eye-tracking experiments. It contains the results of each tr...