Summary: Researchers found that the brains of adolescents with autism process unfamiliar voices in a markedly different way than their neurotypical peers. During adolescence, typically developing teens show increasing responsiveness in brain reward circuitry to strangers’ voices, supporting social exploration. In contrast, autistic teens do not show this developmental increase; many instead grow more responsive to their mother’s voice, a pattern linked to greater social communication challenges.
Key Facts
- Adolescent reward stagnation: In typically developing adolescents, brain regions that signal reward and salience become more responsive to new, unfamiliar voices with age. Autistic adolescents show little or no such increase, and some older teens with more severe symptoms show decreased responsiveness to unfamiliar voices.
- The mother’s voice inversion: The study found opposing developmental trends for maternal voice processing:
- Neurotypical teens: As they mature, they shift attention away from primary caregivers and toward unfamiliar voices, supporting social independence.
- Autistic teens: Many show increasing neural preference for their mother’s voice during adolescence, especially those with greater social communication impairment.
- Autism as a developmental process: Vinod Menon, PhD, emphasizes that autism is not merely a static difference in brain structure or function but unfolds differently across development. The neural tuning to social signals during adolescence follows a divergent trajectory in autism.
- Early vocal differences: Prior research shows autistic children are often less responsive to voices from early childhood, including weaker reactions to their own name and difficulty reading vocal emotions between ages 7 and 12. The new results link these early differences to altered adolescent development.
- Implications for adolescent therapy: Because the teenage brain remains plastic, identifying that reward networks fail to re-tune toward unfamiliar voices creates a promising target for therapies aimed at improving social engagement in autistic adolescents.
Source: Stanford Medicine
Many adolescents on the autism spectrum, like their peers, want friendships, shared activities, and sometimes romantic connections. But forming these relationships can be harder when the brain does not treat unfamiliar voices as rewarding or attention-worthy.
“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.”
A Stanford Medicine-led study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined how autistic and typically developing teens’ brains respond to voices. The research found that, unlike neurotypical teens, autistic adolescents do not show an age-related increase in reward-system responsiveness to unfamiliar voices.
“Typically developing teens become more aware of their social world, and tuning in to new voices supports new connections,” Abrams said. “For some adolescents with autism, their brains are not becoming increasingly responsive to unfamiliar vocal stimuli.”
Vinod Menon, PhD, the study’s senior author, noted that most autism research describes cross-sectional differences without capturing how those differences evolve. “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,” he said.
Earlier work shows autistic children often track voices less reliably than peers. This new study indicates that some autistic adolescents continue to show unchanged—or even reduced—engagement with unfamiliar voices as they age, while simultaneously increasing attention to their mother’s voice.
A key social sound
Voices are a primary channel for emotional connection. The tone and timbre of a person’s voice convey warmth, comfort, sympathy, and social intent. For many autistic children and teens, however, these vocal cues are harder to detect or less intrinsically rewarding.
Autism affects social communication across a spectrum. Common features include differences interpreting voices and facial expressions, maintaining eye contact, focused interests, repetitive behaviors, and sensory sensitivity. Early signs can include reduced response to one’s name; previous studies also found children with autism struggle to detect emotional cues in voices between ages 7 and 12.
The new work addresses a gap: how neural responses to voices change during adolescence in autism, rather than only in childhood or adulthood. “Autism changes over the course of a lifetime,” Abrams said. “The way that autism is expressed in younger kids is different than in teenagers.”
Familiar and unfamiliar voices
The study tested 79 participants aged 7 to 17: 39 autistic individuals and 40 typically developing peers matched by age, sex, and IQ. While undergoing functional MRI, participants heard three types of brief sounds: nonsense words spoken by their mother, the same nonsense words spoken by unfamiliar women, and non-vocal environmental sounds. Using nonsense words avoided activating language comprehension systems and allowed the team to focus on how voice identity and sound quality engage reward and salience networks.
Results showed clear differences across groups. In typically developing teens, reward and salience regions became more responsive to voices with age, especially unfamiliar ones. In autistic teens, these regions did not show age-related increases; in some older participants they were less responsive than in younger children with autism. Meanwhile, autistic adolescents tended to favor their mother’s voice with age—a reversal of the typical developmental pattern—and this tendency correlated with greater social communication difficulties.
New possibilities for treatment
These findings point to adolescence as a potential window for intervention. Treatments for autism have largely concentrated on early childhood, leaving fewer options for teens. Because adolescence remains a period of neural plasticity, the lack of natural re-tuning toward unfamiliar voices suggests a concrete target for therapies—such as auditory training or gamified social listening exercises—that could help build neural pathways supporting broader social engagement.
Funding: The study included collaborators from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. Funding came from 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: Using meaningless syllables prevents activation of language-comprehension regions that process word meaning. This isolates how reward and emotional networks respond to the voice’s acoustic qualities and speaker identity rather than semantic content.
A: No. Many autistic teenagers are motivated to form friendships and social bonds. The study suggests a neural barrier: unfamiliar voices may not trigger the same internal reward response, making social effort more tiring and less intrinsically motivating despite clear desire for connection.
A: Because adolescent brains retain plasticity, interventions could directly target auditory reward pathways—through structured listening exercises, game-like reward pairings with unfamiliar voices, or other behavioral training—to help rebuild responsiveness to new social partners.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by staff.
About this Autism research news
Author: Erin Digitale
Source: Stanford Medicine
Contact: Erin Digitale, Stanford Medicine
Image: Image 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 involves a major shift in attention and motivation from parents toward nonfamilial peers. Autism is characterized by persistent challenges in social communication, but how adolescent neurodevelopment reorganizes voice and reward processing in autism is not well understood. Using functional brain imaging of children and adolescents ages 7 to 17, the study compared neural responses to mother’s voice and nonfamilial voices.
The researchers found divergent age-related trajectories in reward, salience, social evaluative, and frontoparietal regions. Typically developing participants showed age-related increases in activity and connectivity within an extended voice-processing network, whereas individuals with autism showed no increases and in many cases decreases with age. Adolescents with autism exhibited a reversal of the typical developmental pattern: decreased engagement with nonfamilial voices and increased engagement with mother’s voice as age increased, most pronounced in those with more severe social communication challenges. These results suggest that altered organization of voice-reward circuitry may underlie atypical social neurodevelopment in autism and that individual differences in social communication shape age-related neural patterns supporting social reorientation.