What is it about?
Adolescence brings a major social transformation, as children’s social worlds begin to shift away from parents and caregivers and toward peers and new social partners. Many autistic young people also seek new social connections during this period, making adolescence an important time to understand how the brain responds to social signals. We used brain imaging to study how children and adolescents responded to their mother’s voice, unfamiliar voices, and nonsocial sounds. We found that differences between autistic and typically developing participants became more pronounced with age in brain systems involved in recognizing voices, detecting important information, experiencing reward, and understanding social meaning.
Featured Image
Photo by Andrea Tummons on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Autism is a developmental condition, and its features may be expressed differently across stages of life. However, few studies have examined age-related differences in the brain systems involved in voice processing. Understanding how these differences unfold across development may ultimately help researchers identify developmental periods when supports aimed at social communication and engagement could be most effective. Our findings highlight adolescence as a potentially important period and underscore the need for continued social-communication support for autistic young people as they grow older.
Perspectives
Most autism supports focus on younger children, and services often become less available as children grow older. Our finding—that differences in the neural processing of voices become more pronounced across childhood and adolescence—highlights the importance of developing and sustaining supports for autistic young people during this stage of life. Such efforts may help them pursue, build, and strengthen the social connections that are important to them.
Daniel Abrams
Stanford University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Developmental divergence in voice–reward circuitry differentiates autistic from typically developing children and adolescents, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2601227123.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
