A quarterly publication of the Autism Research Institute
Winter, 2019 | Number 1, Volume 33
Children with autism have a diminished response to the sound of their mother’s voice, a new study reports.
Daniel Arthur Abrams and colleagues conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging on 42 children between 7 and 12 years of age. Half of the children had ASD, while the other half were neurotypical controls. The children listened to three different recorded sounds: their mother’s voice, voices of unfamiliar women, and non-vocal environmental sounds. The women spoke nonsense words to avoid activating brain regions involved in language comprehension.
The researchers say that the brain response to unfamiliar voices when compared with the response to environmental sounds, was fairly similar between the two groups. However, in the children without autism, many more brain areas “lit up” in response to their mothers’ voices. These areas included part of the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory, and face-processing regions. Brain-connectivity patterns in a network including auditory processing regions, reward processing regions, and regions that determine the salience of incoming information, also differed between the two groups. The degree of social communication impairment in individual children with ASD correlated with the degree of abnormality in their brain responses to their mother’s voice.
In addition, children with autism were less adept at differentiating their mother’s voice from the voices of unfamiliar women. They were able to identify their mother’s voice only 87.8% of the time, compared to 97.5% for the control group.
Senior study author Vinod Menon comments, “Mom’s voice is the primal cue for social and language communication and learning. There is an underlying biological difference in the brain circuitry in autism, and this is a precision-learning signal we can target.”
“Impaired voice processing in reward and salience circuits predicts social communication in children with autism,” Daniel Arthur Abrams, Aarthi Padmanabhan, Tianwen Chen, Paola Odriozola, Amanda E. Baker, John Kochalka, Jennifer M. Phillips, and Vinod Menon, eLIFE, February 26, 2019 (free online). Address: Daniel Arthur
Abrams, [email protected] or Vinod Menon, [email protected].
—and—
“Brain response to mom’s voice differs in kids with autism,” Erin Digitale, Stanford News Center, February 26, 2019.
