These innovations have advanced from merely associating an activation pattern with a particular thought to decomposing the activation pattern into its neural and psychological components. For example, the activation pattern corresponding to the thought of a banana consists of components representing how one holds a banana and how one eats a banana. Another example is that the thought of an emotion such as sadness can be identified in terms of the neural representation of its valence, degree of arousal, and sociality. Thus it has become possible to assess the content of a thought in neurotypical populations. In our study, this approach was applied to characterize the altered neural representation of social concepts in autism, known to be disordered in terms of psychiatric Reversine diagnosis. If certain types of social concepts are altered in autism, it may be possible to detect the alterations and possibly interpret them as diagnostic of autism; and understand the biological and psychological nature of the alterations in terms of the underlying dimensions of neural representation; and make use of the understanding to develop therapies that ameliorate the alteration. Furthermore, if the approach is successful with respect to autism, it may hold promise for application to other psychiatric disorders. One of the largest challenges in autism research is to determine the relation between the psychological alterations in autism and the neural alterations. Because the social alterations are often the most prominent ones in autism, fMRI studies of autism have investigated the relation between brain and behavior with respect to several different types of social processing. One of the earliest-studied social functions investigated with fMRI was face perception, during which it was found that the fusiform face area activated abnormally in autism. A second type of social task in which altered activation was found in autism was in Theory of Mind processing in which participants must understand the mental state of another individual. Hence the current study investigated a number of social interactions, using a neurosemantic paradigm in which participants are asked to think about a concept such as to insult, while their brain activation was assessed with fMRI. Several fMRI studies of autism that have involved self-related cognition have found disruption of the brain activation in midline cortical structures, as summarized in a recent review. One example is that in participants with autism there is a failure to reduce the activity in midline structures during the performance of a cognitive task, which has been attributed to a reduction of self-referential processing in the resting state in autism. Another example of unusual selfrelated disruption in children with autism is the use of the pronoun you to refer to themselves, echoing the use of that pronoun by others to refer to the child, as first noted by Kanner. This language behavior is ascribed to an errorful assessment of the relation between the self and another person. Consistent with Kanner’s observations, an fMRI study of pronoun processing in adult participants.