Schedule of Events | Symposia

Reduced Mismatch Negativity in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Virginia A. Rosenberger^1,2, Winko W. An^1,2, Brooke E. Keough^1,2, Noah Crane^1,2, Leena Gupta^1,2, April R. Levin^1,2, Charles A. Nelson^1,2,3; ¹Boston Children's Hospital, ²Harvard Medical School, ³Harvard University

Atypical sensory processing is a common feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and has been associated with irregularities in predicting sensory inputs. However, the neural underpinnings of these irregularities, especially during development, remain unclear. In this study, we adopted a Local-Global auditory oddball paradigm with two levels of regularity to assess the neural response to auditory oddballs in ASD. Utilizing high density electroencephalography (EEG) data collected from children (2 – 12 years) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n=27) and typical development (TD, n=26), we calculated Mismatch Negativity (MMN) from the difference in event-related potentials between local standard and deviant tones, elicited in response to stimuli deviations in a string of stimuli regularities. We performed ANCOVA to compare MMN magnitude between the ASD and TD groups while accounting for age differences across individuals and observed a reduced MMN in ASD participants compared to TD participants (p = 0.035). We further plan to perform a time frequency analysis on this data comparing responses to standard and deviant tones between children with ASD and TD, and to analyze the P300 component elicited by global deviations in the Local-Global paradigm. These findings suggest altered error prediction in ASD, which may be related to reduced sensory habituation and hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli reported in individuals with autism.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition