Autism, Personality Pathology, and the Neural Response to Rewards.
Autistic kids’ brains light up less for smiles than for cash, so give them real reinforcers alongside praise.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team scanned the kids with ASD and 40 typical peers while they played a game. Kids could win real money or see a smiling face after correct answers.
Each child lay in an fMRI scanner and pressed buttons. Correct presses earned either coins or social praise. The researchers watched which brain parts lit up.
What they found
The ASD group showed weaker activity in reward circuits for both prizes. The drop was biggest when the prize was a happy face.
Money still triggered some brain response, but social rewards barely moved the needle. This gap explains why social learning feels flat for many autistic kids.
How this fits with other research
Nijs et al. (2016) saw the same blunt effect outside the scanner. They filmed kids watching funny clips. Autistic children laughed less even when they copied smiles, matching the low brain response McCormick et al. (2025) found.
Hanson et al. (2013) looked at reward value over time. They reported that autistic kids devalue edible and social rewards faster than money. The new study adds brain proof: the social reward signal is weak from the start.
Duerden et al. (2012) pooled earlier brain studies and showed that social-cognition areas mature differently in young autistic brains. McCormick et al. (2025) extends that work by showing the reward part of those circuits is also under-active.
Why it matters
If social praise feels like pennies, don’t rely on it alone. Pair verbal praise with concrete items the child already works for—stickers, tokens, screen time. Watch the brain-blunt pattern in your data: if social rewards stop working, swap in a tangible backup before escape behavior starts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The social motivation hypothesis of autism posits that infants with autism do not experience social stimuli as rewarding, thereby leading to a cascade of potentially negative consequences for later development. While possible downstream effects of this hypothesis such as altered face and voice processing have been examined, there has not been a direct investigation of social reward processing in autism. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine social and monetary rewarded implicit learning in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Sixteen males with ASD and sixteen age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) males were scanned while performing two versions of a rewarded implicit learning task. In addition to examining responses to reward, we investigated the neural circuitry supporting rewarded learning and the relationship between these factors and social development. We found diminished neural responses to both social and monetary rewards in ASD, with a pronounced reduction in response to social rewards (SR). Children with ASD also demonstrated a further deficit in frontostriatal response during social, but not monetary, rewarded learning. Moreover, we show a relationship between ventral striatum activity and social reciprocity in TD children. Together, these data support the hypothesis that children with ASD have diminished neural responses to SR, and that this deficit relates to social learning impairments.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1002/aur.122