Effects of sensory distraction and salience priming on emotion identification in autism: an fMRI study.

The results suggest that the sensory environment plays an important role in how ASD youth process social information. Additionally, we demonstrated that increasing attention to relevant social cues helps ASD youth engage frontal regions involved in higher-order social cognition, a mechanism that could be targeted in interventions. Importantly, the effect of the intervention may depend on individual differences in SOR, supporting the importance of pre-screening youth for sensory challenges prior to social interventions.