Green SA, et al. - Researchers investigated where sensory overresponsivity (SOR) fall in three fundamental stages of sensory processing among 42 high-functioning children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; 21 with high levels of SOR and 21 with low levels of SOR) and 27 age-matched typically developing youths (ages 8–17). The three fundamental stages of sensory processing are arousal (ie, initial response), habituation (ie, change in response over time), and generalization of response to novel stimuli. They used functional MRI to assess these patterns of neural habituation to two sets of comparable mildly aversive auditory and tactile stimuli. As per results, atypical brain responses to sensory stimuli are displayed by all children with autism, however, top-down regulatory mechanisms influence if they express atypical behavioral responses. They noted lowered ability to maintain habituation in the amygdala and pertinent sensory cortices and inhibition of extraneous sensory cortices across repeated sensory stimulation among high-SOR participants with ASD. However, distinct, nontypical neural response patterns were also evident among low-SOR participants with ASD, like lowered responsiveness to the novel but comparable stimuli and increases in prefrontal-amygdala regulation across the sensory exposure.