Electrodermal Response to Reward and Non-Reward Among Children With Autism.
Autistic kids' skin stays sweaty after missing expected rewards—slip occasional 'no-prize' trials into sessions and watch the electrodermal stickiness fade.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Myers et al. (2015) wired up 24 boys with autism and 24 typical boys . They stuck two tiny electrodes on each kid's fingers to measure skin sweat, a signal called electrodermal response (EDR).
The team flashed colored squares on a screen. Kids pressed a button fast to win candy or stickers. Sometimes the reward came, sometimes it didn't. The lab recorded how the boys' skin reacted to both hits and misses.
What they found
When rewards showed up, both groups of boys showed the same quick spike in skin sweat. Autistic kids were not less excited by winning.
The twist came when rewards never arrived. Typical boys' skin response quickly dropped back to baseline. Autistic boys stayed sweaty longer, and the bigger this lingering response, the worse their social and emotional scores on standard tests.
How this fits with other research
Izawa et al. (2012) saw slower motor learning in autistic kids who leaned too much on body feedback. Emily's team now adds a body-feedback marker—lingering EDR—that flags trouble with unexpected outcomes. Both studies point to an inflexible body-brain loop.
Bedford et al. (2016) found autistic teens ignore conflicting visual cues, giving them an edge on certain tasks. The same 'filter' may explain why they keep reacting after missing a reward: their body can't update 'no prize' as fast as typical kids.
Ben-Itzchak et al. (2020) showed kids with motor delays keep sweating longer after errors. Emily's autistic sample shows a similar sticky EDR pattern, hinting that slow physiological reset cuts across diagnostic labels.
Why it matters
Build 'maybe no prize' trials into your teaching loops. When a child works for tokens, deliberately skip a payout now and then and watch the skin on the back of the hand. If sweat sticks around, slow the pace and add extra prompts to signal 'all done, next trial.' This tiny pause trains the child's body to update faster, cutting frustration and boosting social flexibility.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pervasive social difficulties among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often construed as deriving from reduced sensitivity to social stimuli. Behavioral and neurobiological evidence suggests that typical individuals show preferential processing of social (e.g., voices, faces) over nonsocial (e.g., nonvocal sounds, images of objects) information, whereas individuals with ASD may not. This reduction in sensitivity may reflect disrupted reward processing [Dawson & Bernier, ], with significant developmental consequences for affected individuals. In this study, we explore effects of social and monetary reward on behavioral and electrodermal responses (EDRs) among 8- to 12-year-old boys with (n = 18) and without (n = 18) ASD, with attention to the potential moderating effects of stimulus familiarity. During a simple matching task, participants with and without ASD had marginally slower reactions during social vs. nonsocial reward, and boys with ASD had less accurate responses than controls. Compared to baseline, reward and non-reward conditions elicited more frequent and larger EDRs for participants as a whole, and both groups showed similar patterns of EDR change within reward blocks. However, boys with and without ASD differed in their EDRs to non-reward, and response amplitude was correlated with social and emotional functioning. These findings provide some support for altered reward responding in ASD at the autonomic level, and highlight the discontinuation of reward as an important component of reward-based learning that may play a role in shaping behavior and guiding specialized brain development to subserve social behavior and cognition across the lifespan.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2015 · doi:10.1002/aur.1451