Sensory over-responsivity and atypical neural responses to socially relevant stimuli in autism.
Autistic kids who hate loud sounds or tags on shirts show blunted brain discrimination between social and nonsocial threats—plan social skills work in calm sensory spaces first.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team scanned autistic and typical teens while they heard or felt mild but annoying stimuli. Some cues were social, like a baby cry. Others were not, like a car horn.
The kids also filled out a sensory-over-responsivity scale. The goal was to see whose brains could tell social from nonsocial threats.
What they found
Autistic youth with high sensory over-responsivity showed the least brain difference between social and nonsocial aversive cues. Their amygdala and sensory-motor areas lit up to both kinds.
Typical teens and autistic teens with low sensory scores showed clearer brain separation of the two cue types.
How this fits with other research
Ben-Sasson et al. (2009) pooled 14 studies showing that sensory under-responsivity is the strongest behavioral marker of autism. The new scan data give a neural reason: the brain mixes up social and general threats when over-responsivity is high.
Bao et al. (2017) found weak thalamic filtering and strong amygdala coupling during sensory tasks in the same lab sample. The 2024 paper extends that work by showing the social-nonsocial blur happens only in the high over-responsivity subgroup.
Peled-Avron et al. (2017) saw touch hypervigilance when autistic adults merely viewed social touch pictures. The new study shows the hyper-reactivity continues when the touch is real and aversive, linking it to poor social cue discrimination.
Why it matters
If a client covers her ears when people speak, her brain may treat voices like random noise. Teach social skills in low-sensory settings first, then pair them with controlled social sounds or touch so the brain relearns what is social and what is not.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Start your next social lesson in a quiet room, then gradually add mild social sounds while praising calm behavior.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Although aversive responses to sensory stimuli are common in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), it remains unknown whether the social relevance of aversive sensory inputs affects their processing. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural responses to mildly aversive nonsocial and social sensory stimuli as well as how sensory over-responsivity (SOR) severity relates to these responses. Participants included 21 ASD and 25 typically-developing (TD) youth, aged 8.6-18.0 years. Results showed that TD youth exhibited significant neural discrimination of socially relevant versus irrelevant aversive sensory stimuli, particularly in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), regions that are crucial for sensory and social processing. In contrast, ASD youth showed reduced neural discrimination of social versus nonsocial stimuli in the amygdala and OFC, as well as overall greater neural responses to nonsocial compared with social stimuli. Moreover, higher SOR in ASD was associated with heightened responses in sensory-motor regions to socially-relevant stimuli. These findings further our understanding of the relationship between sensory and social processing in ASD, suggesting limited attention to the social relevance compared with aversiveness level of sensory input in ASD versus TD youth, particularly in ASD youth with higher SOR.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1038/s41467-022-34084-0