Motivation is said to be greatest when driven by reward. When we feel a reward sensation we are more likely to repeat the behavior that lead to reward whether that be social interaction, earning money, response to food, learning, etc…  There are known areas of the brain that are involved in reward responses and a recent study attempted to see what type of reward responses were present in children with autism when presented with social and monetary rewards.

In order to better determine why children with autism appear to have little motivation to interact with others, Scott-Van Zeeland et al. (2010) looked at active networks (fMRI) while typical children and children with ASD completed reward learning tasks where the reward was monetary or social. Children with ASD (around 12 years of age) didn’t appear to learn the tasks compared to typical children. When looking at cortical networks activated with rewarding stimuli, there were no statistically significant cortical differences with monetary reward. There were statistically significant difference in response to the social reward stimuli, where typical children showed activation of known reward areas and children with autism had activation of the visual processing centers without activation of reward-related areas.

This study recruited participants that were age and IQ matched and had them all complete the same tasks. There were 16 participants in each group, which is pretty darn good for a neurological study on autism. They used tasks that had been previously used in studies, so there was some data backing up the task chosen.

Clinical Implications: Okay, this obviously isn’t a music therapy study and doesn’t have a direct transfer into the clinic. BUT lets take a quick look at some music neuroscience. Consider two things 1) MUSIC has been shown to activate cortical reward centers (see Blood and Zatorre, 2001 and Koelsch, 2009) and 2) children with ASD have been suggested/shown to be uniquely attracted to music (see Wan et al. 2010). Is it possible that music can increase reward response in children with ASD?  We often see how motivated children with autism are in music therapy – perhaps we are activating shared networks while creating a reward response that otherwise wouldn’t occur. Take the study above, insert music, and you’d have a very cool study.

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