Summary: Researchers demonstrated that the brains of teenagers with autism handle the sounds of unfamiliar voices in a fundamentally different way. Unlike their neurotypical peers, adolescents on the autism spectrum do not experience an developmental uptick in reward-center responsiveness toward strangers’ voices as they grow older, causing them to follow an entirely separate auditory and social trajectory.
Key Facts
- The Adolescent Reward Stagnation: In typically developing teens, brain regions governing reward and salience (the network that decides what is worthy of attention) display a major surge in responsiveness to new, unfamiliar voices as they age. In stark contrast, these same reward networks in autistic teens show zero change with age, and among older teens with severe symptoms, responsiveness to strangers actually drops.
- The Mother’s Voice Inversion: The study exposed an intriguing divergence regarding how the brain processes maternal signals:
- Neurotypical Teens: As they grow up, their brains gradually shift emphasis away from their mothers’ voices, dialing up their engagement with unfamiliar voices to prepare for adult independence.
- Autistic Teens: As they navigate adolescence, their brains tune in increasingly to their mothers’ voices. This internal neural favoritism toward Mom was most pronounced in individuals exhibiting the highest social communication deficits.
- Autism Across Time: Dr. Vinod Menon emphasizes that autism research frequently focuses on a static checklist of brain differences, failing to account for how those differences unfold dynamically across the aging process. The way the human mind scores social signals is continuously reshaped throughout the teenage years, but in autism, this timeline takes a vastly different path.
- The Early Vocal Blind Spot: This adolescent shift follows an early childhood pattern. Autistic children often show reduced neural tracking of voices in early life (such as failing to respond to their own names) and struggle to read basic vocal emotions between ages 7 and 12.
- A New Horizon for Teen Therapy: Historically, clinical autism therapies have targeted early childhood and preschool populations, leaving a massive care gap for adolescents. Dr. Daniel Abrams points out that because the teenage brain remains highly plastic, understanding this failure to re-tune vocal reward networks opens up a “golden opportunity” to build targeted therapies for lonely teens who are eager to connect.
Source: Stanford
Just like other teenagers, many teens on the autism spectrum are itching to exercise their social muscles. They hope for new friends, fun with people who share their interests, maybe even a romantic relationship.
“Adolescence is a moment of opportunity for these kids,” said Daniel Abrams, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine. “They want to build friendships.”
But spreading their social wings is challenging for teens with autism. A new Stanford Medicine-led study, publishing July 13 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds light on a key factor: how the brains of teenagers with autism handle the sounds of unfamiliar voices. Unlike in neurotypical teenagers, the reward centers in autistic teens’ brains don’t become increasingly responsive to strangers’ voices as they mature, the research found.
“Typically developing teens are becoming far more aware of their social world, and tuning in to new voices is important for making new social connections,” said Abrams, who led the new research as well as a 2022 study on neurotypical teens’ responses to voices.
“Our results point to adolescence as a period when, for some kids with autism, their brains are not becoming increasingly responsive to unfamiliar vocal stimuli,” Abrams said. “Their brains did not show an uptick in responding to new voices like the neurotypical kids did.”
The study’s senior author is Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
“We tend to think of autism in terms of what the brain does differently, but not enough about how those differences unfold with age,” Menon said. “The way the brain attends to socially relevant information is reshaped throughout adolescence, and in autism that developmental process appears to follow a different course.”
Young kids with autism are less attuned to voices than others their age, prior research has shown. As they reach adolescence, some teens with autism show unchanged engagement with voices, while those with the most severe autism symptoms are even less engaged than younger kids.
The researchers also examined how teens’ brains respond to the sound of their mother’s voice. In neurotypical teens, the sound of Mom’s voice remains highly rewarding, but unfamiliar voices become increasingly engaging as adolescents mature. In contrast, teens with autism become increasingly attuned to their mother’s voice, with the strongest examples of this pattern in teens with the most severe autism symptoms.
A key social sound
The voices of people around us — friends, family members, even strangers — are a key signal in human emotional bonds. (Think of the swell of happiness you feel from the sound of a loved one’s voice after a long absence, or the comfort of hearing a friend’s sympathetic tone if you are grieving.)
“Voices provide a really important set of cues to help us feel connected to the people we know and love,” Abrams said. “But, from early stages of development, kids with autism struggle to tune into the vocal world.”
Autism is a developmental disorder that affects 1 in 31 children and is characterized by social difficulties, not just with interpreting voices but also with skills such as interpreting facial expressions and maintaining eye contact as well as restricted interests, repetitive behaviors and sensory aberrations. The condition exists on a wide spectrum, with some individuals much more affected than others.
A small child’s unresponsiveness to the sound of their own name can be an early clue that they have autism. And prior research by Abrams’ team showed that 7- to 12-year-old children with autism have difficulty picking up emotional cues in people’s voices.
However, no one had studied how brain responses to voices change during adolescence in autism.
“Autism changes over the course of a lifetime; it’s not one thing,” Abrams said. “The way that autism is expressed in younger kids is different than in older kids and in teenagers.”
Understanding how autism manifests in teens could drive new opportunities for therapies tailored to this phase of life, he added.
Familiar and unfamiliar voices
The researchers studied 79 children and teens who were 7 to 17 years old. The group included 39 participants with autism spectrum disorder and 40 typically developing participants who were matched on age, sex and IQ to the individuals with autism.
As their brain activity was being recorded by the functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, the study participants listened to three types of brief recordings: nonsense words such as “keebudishawlt” spoken by their mother; the same nonsense words spoken by two unfamiliar women; and non-voice environmental sounds, such as a dishwasher running. (Nonsense words were used in the voice recordings to avoid engaging parts of the brain that respond to the meanings of words.) The researchers analyzed how the brain responded to each type of sound in young people with and without autism, and how the responses varied with age.
The study produced several insights into how the adolescent brain is processing voices in autism, Abrams said.
The researchers found that “social” brain centers engaged differently depending on whether the individual had autism. In typically developing teens, the brain’s reward centers and brain regions focused on salience (directing what one pays attention to) both responded more strongly to voices the older the teen was. In teens with autism, the reward and salience centers did not become more responsive to voices, and in some older individuals these brain regions were even less responsive to voices than in younger children with autism.
The research also found that teens with autism tuned in more to their mother’s voice than to unfamiliar voices — the opposite of what neurotypical teenagers do.
The more impaired their social skills were, the more their brains favored the sound of their mom’s voice.
“In neurotypical kids, we found a strong pattern in adolescence to tune in more to unfamiliar voices than to Mom’s voice,” Abrams said. “They’re tuning into new social partners.”
But in kids with autism, he said, “Instead of tuning into unfamiliar voices during adolescence, they were tuning in more to the sound of their mom than at younger ages. We think this pattern reflects the social communication challenges faced by many adolescents with autism.”
New possibilities for treatment
The findings point to new prospects for autism therapies tailored to the characteristics of the teen brain, Abrams said.
“Autism treatments are often focused on much younger kids, with far fewer options for adolescents,” he said, adding that early interventions focused on preschoolers remain critically important, but teens shouldn’t be neglected.
“We know the brain is plastic and developing all the way through adolescence, in everyone,” he said. “There’s no question that adolescence provides a golden opportunity, especially for teens with autism who are enthusiastic about building social connections. We hope the field can translate our expanding knowledge of the brain into more effective interventions.”
Funding: A researcher from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich contributed to the study. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grant K01MH102428), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and an anonymous philanthropic donation.
Key Questions Answered:
A: If the scientists had used real words, like “hello,” “friend,” or “banana”, the fMRI scans would have lit up across the brain’s complex language comprehension areas (like Wernicke’s area) as the teens tried to decode the meanings of the words. By inventing completely meaningless nonsense words, the researchers bypassed the brain’s language processing centers entirely. This allowed them to isolate exactly how the brain’s raw emotional and reward networks react to the sound quality and identity of a voice itself, free from semantic distractions.
A: Absolutely not. In fact, Dr. Daniel Abrams explicitly emphasizes that many teenagers with autism are highly enthusiastic about building friendships, finding romance, and exercising their social muscles with peers who share their interests. The core issue isn’t a lack of desire or motivation; it is a hardware barrier. Their brains are simply not delivering the same internal chemical reward spike when they hear a stranger’s voice, making the hard work of social engagement feel uniquely exhausting and neurologically uninviting.
A: Because we now know that the teenage brain remains incredibly plastic, this discovery reveals a clear target for behavioral therapies. Instead of using generalized social skills guides, we can build specialized auditory training games and interactive exercises that explicitly gamify listening to unfamiliar voices. By pairing strangers’ voices with direct digital, visual, or social rewards early in adolescence, we can exploit the brain’s natural plasticity to artificially build up those dormant neural pathways, helping these eager teenagers naturally tune into the social world around them.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this Autism research news
Author: Erin Digitale
Source: Stanford Medicine
Contact: Erin Digitale – Stanford Medicine
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Developmental divergence in voice-reward circuitry differentiates autistic from typically developing children and adolescents” by Aarthi Padmanabhan, Amanda E. Baker, Daniel A. Abrams, Jennifer M. Phillips, Paola Odriozola, Simon Leipold, Vinod Menon. PNAS
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2601227123
Abstract
Developmental divergence in voice-reward circuitry differentiates autistic from typically developing children and adolescents
Adolescence is a period of profound social change marked by a developmental shift in attention and motivation from parents toward nonfamilial peers. Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by lifelong challenges in social communication. However, the neurobiological signatures of adolescent social reorientation in autism are poorly understood.
Human voice processing is a primary driver of social learning and communication, but it remains understudied in the autism literature, particularly as it relates to neurodevelopmental change. Here we used functional brain imaging of voice processing in children and adolescents with autism and matched controls (ages 7 to 17) to examine neural responses to mother’s voice and nonfamilial voices.
We identified divergent age-related patterns in autism across reward, salience, social evaluative, and frontoparietal processing regions consistent with models of an extended voice processing network. Results showed that while typically developing participants exhibited age-related increases in neural activity and connectivity within regions of the voice processing network, individuals with autism showed no age-related increases, and often decreases, in these regions.
Adolescents with autism further revealed a reversal of the characteristic developmental pattern: with increasing age, they exhibited decreasing neural engagement with nonfamilial voices and increasing engagement with mother’s voice, a pattern that was most pronounced in individuals with more severe social communication challenges.
Findings suggest that disrupted organization of the extended voice processing network, including reward, salience, social evaluative, and frontoparietal circuitry, may underlie atypical social neurodevelopment in autism. More broadly, results suggest that individual differences in social communication shape age-related neural patterns supporting social reorientation.
