Neural Mechanisms of Social and Nonsocial Reward Prediction Errors in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Jessica Lynn Kinard, Maya Gelman Mosner, Rachel Kirsten Greene and 11 others
PMID 32043748WHAT IT FOUND
Adolescents with autism showed different brain activation when social rewards were unexpected, but not when object rewards were unexpected.
Links to reaction time and nonverbal communication skills did not hold after checking many tests. No therapy effect was tested.
Key findings
01During social reward prediction errors, adolescents with autism showed altered activation in frontal and precentral regions, including the right frontal pole, right anterior cingulate gyrus, and precentral gyrus.
02No brain activation differences were found between groups for nonsocial object reward prediction errors.
03Exploratory links between social reward prediction error activation and reaction time or paralinguistic communication did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparisons.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample was small, and the autism group had 3 females, so sex differences could not be examined. The correlations with behavior and symptoms did not survive correction for multiple comparisons, so they are exploratory. There were no significant group by task interaction clusters, so differences between social and nonsocial responses should be interpreted with caution. Participants with autism were adolescents with at least average IQ scores, so results may not generalize to younger children or people with lower IQ scores. The task was learned before scanning, so the study could not examine learning from prediction errors during the scan.
Declared interests
The supplied publication types list research support from the N.I.H., extramural, and non-U.S. Gov't. The supplied article text does not include a conflicts of interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the brain activation differences as evidence that unpredictable social rewards improve communication. The study did not test therapy, the sample was small, and the links to behavior did not hold after checking many tests.