severe impairment in the social domain exhibited increased functional connectivity. Therefore, the aberrant short‐/long‐distance connectivity may be associated with pathogenic mechanisms in children with ASD. Long‐distance connectivity is a higher‐level brain activity, which rapidly integrates information in different brain areas into a consistent behavioral or cognitive state. Beta signal is mainly observed in brain frontal and central areas, and related to positive thinking and concentration of mind (Pfurtscheller & Lopes da Silva, 1999). Our result showed that ASD had increased long‐distance coherence in the frontal and central regions in beta band; this might suggest a dysfunctional connectivity pattern of some brain regions in children with ASD. In resting state, information integration and processing need multiple brain regions to cooperate with each other. According to neural compensatory mechanism, the increased long‐distance coherence may represent compensatory processes or reduced neural pruning (Duffy & Als, 2012). This may constitute a compensatory attempt of the autistic brain to form atypical, spatially disparate, cortical networks in an attempt to replace function normally subserved by assumed‐to‐be deficient more localized networks. This compensatory mechanism may be the cause of increased long‐distance coherence in children with ASD.
