Neural Mechanisms of Social and Nonsocial Reward Prediction Errors in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Autistic teens’ brains stumble only on social prediction errors, so social praise alone may not strengthen behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kinard et al. (2020) scanned autistic and typical teens while they played a game. The game gave social rewards, like a smiling face, or nonsocial rewards, like money.
The team looked at brain activity when the reward was better or worse than expected. This mismatch is called a prediction error.
What they found
Only social rewards lit up the autistic brain in odd ways. Some areas fired more, some fired less. Money rewards looked the same in both groups.
Slower reaction times and weaker social skills went hand-in-hand with these odd social signals.
How this fits with other research
McCormick et al. (2025) used the same game and saw an even steeper drop in social-reward brain signals. Their sharper picture updates Lynn’s mixed result.
Safer-Lichtenstein et al. (2021) pooled 47 studies and found autistic people often show quirky prediction learning. Lynn’s data sit inside that bigger pattern.
Li et al. (2017) showed that pairing faces with prizes still grabs attention in autism. Lynn adds that the brain’s error signal, not the final attention, is the weak link.
Why it matters
When you teach a teen with autism, do not assume a thumbs-up or smile works like a token. The brain may not register the social ‘error’ it needs to learn. Pair social cues with clear nonsocial payoffs first, then fade the extras.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by impaired predictive abilities; however, the neural mechanisms subsuming reward prediction errors in ASD are poorly understood. In the current study, we investigated neural responses during social and nonsocial reward prediction errors in 22 adolescents with ASD (ages 12-17) and 20 typically developing control adolescents (ages 12-18). Participants performed a reward prediction error task using both social (i.e., faces) and nonsocial (i.e., objects) rewards during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Reward prediction errors were defined in two ways: (a) the signed prediction error, the difference between the experienced and expected reward; and (b) the thresholded unsigned prediction error, the difference between expected and unexpected outcomes regardless of magnitude. During social reward prediction errors, the ASD group demonstrated the following differences relative to the TD group: (a) signed prediction error: decreased activation in the right precentral gyrus and increased activation in the right frontal pole; and (b) thresholded unsigned prediction error: increased activation in the right anterior cingulate gyrus and bilateral precentral gyrus. Groups did not differ in brain activation during nonsocial reward prediction errors. Within the ASD group, exploratory analyses revealed that reaction times and social-communication impairments were related to precentral gyrus activation during social prediction errors. These findings elucidate the neural mechanisms of social reward prediction errors in ASD and suggest that ASD is characterized by greater neural atypicalities during social, relative to nonsocial, reward prediction errors in ASD. Autism Res 2020, 13: 715-728. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: We used brain imaging to evaluate differences in brain activation in adolescents with autism while they performed tasks that involved learning about social and nonsocial information. We found no differences in brain responses during the nonsocial condition, but differences during the social condition of the learning task. This study provides evidence that autism may involve different patterns of brain activation when learning about social information.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2020 · doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.05.041