Abstract
For decades, researchers have sought to clarify the nature of the social communication impairments in autism, highlighting impaired or atypical 'social attention' as a key measurable construct that helps to define the core impairment of social communication. In this paper, we provide an overview of research on social attention impairments in autism and their relation to deficiencies in neural circuitry related to social reward. We offer a framework for considering social attention as a potential moderator or mediator of response to early behavioral intervention, and as an early indicator of efficacy of behavioral and/or pharmacological treatments aimed at addressing the social impairments in autism.
Highlights
Decades of research have sought to clarify the nature of the social communication impairments, highlighting impaired or atypical ‘social attention’ as a key measurable construct that helps define the core impairment of social communication
We offer a framework for considering social attention as a potential moderator or mediator of response to early behavioral intervention, and a biomarkera that could potentially be useful as an early indicator of efficacy of behavioral and pharmacological treatments aimed at addressing the social communication impairments in autism
It has been hypothesized that early behavioral intervention can mitigate these negative consequences by enhancing social motivation by either stimulating nascent neural circuitry involved in social reward, or by co-opting neural reward systems that target non-social stimuli through classical conditioning [19]
Summary
Child is presented with child-directed speech sounds or frequency and amplitude matched non-speech sounds from speakers placed to the left and right of the child. Kuhl and colleagues utilized an auditory preference task in which young children with autism and typical peers oriented to a loudspeaker to the left and right that presented either child-directed speech sounds or frequency and amplitude matched non-speech sounds [5]. When presented with a deviant auditory stimulus, the high-risk infants did not show the same amplitude increase of the ERP component as their low-risk peers [104] This reduced habituation to repeated stimuli and the corresponding attenuated response to stimulus change may play a role in the reduced sensitivity to social stimuli and the orienting deficits observed in ASD. Future studies are needed to determine whether the patterns of blink inhibition found by Shultz et al are consistent throughout development
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