Extensive thalamic pathology both in terms of microstructure, gross anatomy and functional engagement have been consistently reported in SZ. Our findings extend this literature to include thalamic dysfunction to social cognition tasks. Although Activation Likelihood Estimation represents a powerful approach for the meta-analytic treatment of neuroimaging data, a number of factors should be considered in the interpretation of the current set of findings. First, comparison of neuroimaging studies between SZ and ASD is complicated by the variability of the activation paradigms used. We attempted to minimise this by grouping together paradigms that map on to different domains of social cognition and then examining them separately. This was possible for studies investigating attribution of affective states using facial expressions. However, given the variability of the ToM paradigms we followed the approach of other meta-analytic studies, which have also pooled several related domains of cognition together. Second, we accepted the results of individual original studies as reported, since ALE analyses do not allow for weighting based on the threshold of significance employed in each original study. Some studies have reported coordinates extracted from MK-1775 955365-80-7 pre-specified regions of interest; this may have inflated the weight assigned to the findings regarding the amygdala and fusiform gyrus, and medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate and STS. Third, ASD and SZ patients differ in their symptom profiles, with psychotic symptoms being predominantly associated with the diagnosis of SZ. Previous studies have suggested that the presence or absence of positive symptoms may contribute to the distribution and degree of functional disruption in SZ during social cognition. The contribution of psychotic symptoms to the present findings is unclear. Nevertheless, the majority of SZ studies included patients that would be Compound Library generally regarded as being in remission. Fourth, we have documented effects of antipsychotic medication on signal differences in several brain regions; however, these effects are predominantly ameliorative, and are thus unlikely to account for the differences observed between groups. Fifth, although gender differences have been found during social cognition tasks it was not possible to examine this directly because the predominance of male participants in ASD studies did not allow genderspecific analysis of the available data. Fifth, age differences between the diagnostic groups may have influenced our findings, particularly in ToM tasks, where ASD patients were significantly younger than SZ patients. Indeed, an effect of age was observed in prefrontal regions, favouring SZ. Sixth, the average sample size per study was generally small.