Neural Responses to Hearing One's Own Name and on Subsequent Attention to External Stimuli in Autistic and Typically Developing Children

Abstract

Hearing one’s own name produces unique patterns of brain activation and triggers attention and orienting responses to the caller. Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder don’t respond to their own name and exhibit atypical patterns of neural processing. However, it is still unclear to what extent young children with ASD show atypical neural processing of their own names or subsequent increased attention to their environment. In this study, we firstly investigated if neural responses to own name in young children with ASD is atypical compared to typically developing (TD) children, and secondly whether it fails to enhance attention to subsequent display of visual stimuli. Auditory event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to own and unfamiliar names, followed by visual ERPs when viewing objects after hearing them. Results showed that whereas TD children had enhanced auditory ERP responses when hearing their own relative to an unfamiliar name, indicative of increased attention and cognitive processing, children with ASD did not. However, both TD and ASD children showed equivalent changes in N2, P3 and LPP visual ERP components when viewing objects after hearing their own relative to an unfamiliar name, indicating that children with ASD do show a typical pattern of enhanced attention and cognitive processing of external objects after hearing their own name.  These findings suggest that while children with ASD who do not overtly respond to their own names show atypical neural responses to them, they nevertheless exhibit enhanced attention to objects in their environment afterwards similar to TD children.

Note:
Funding Information: This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFC2705201), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32271123, 31971026), Key Project for Technological Innovation and Application Development of Chongqing (CSTB2022TIAD-KPX0150), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (SWU2009104) and Innovation Research 2035 Pilot Plan of Southwest University (SWUPilotPlan006).

Declaration of Interests: All authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Ethics Approval Statement: The research was approved by the Southwest University Human Research Institutional Review Board. Parents signed informed consent. All children received a toy car for participating. The personal information (e.g., self-name, diagnostic scores) of all children was kept confidential.

Keywords: Autism spectrum disorder, self awareness, own name, Event-related potential, social development