Post hoc analyses

Due to the ongoing controversy of including global signal regression in our 36 parameter models, we re-evaluated our significant group differences with a 24 parameter models that excluded covariates related to global, white matter, and cerebro-spinal fluid signal. While we included MRI sequence as a covariate in our original analysis, we also evaluated whether there were significant interactions between group effects and MRI sequence. We conducted a sensitivity analysis to examine how our findings may (or may not) change with better group matching of IQ rather than entering it as a covariate in all analyses. To accomplish this goal, we individually matched children within 1 standard deviation on GCA and removed all participants with ASD that had a GCA score below the lowest TDC score. We also evaluated the global participation coefficient between groups. This measure quantifies how connected a node is to other nodes within and between systems [50] instead of evaluating a grand functional connectivity mean. Thus, this complementary measure of global functional connectivity indexes the number of connections across nodes instead of overall strength. Finally, we explored the relationship of age to our key topology findings.