Infant Sensory Over-Responsivity: Relations to Early Life Adversity, Emerging Behavioral Problems, and Sensory Functional Connectivity

Prenatal social disadvantage and maternal psychosocial stress predict sensory over-responsivity at age two (N=399), which then forecasts autism and anxiety problems at ages two and three.

• Why it matters: The developmental timing linking early-life adversity to later autism and anxiety is unclear, limiting early identification and mechanistic understanding of sensory-related risk.
• What they did: Using neonatal fMRI and longitudinal behavior, negative binomial models tested prenatal predictors of age-two SOR, and mediation assessed whether age-two SOR explained links to age-three behavioral problems.
• The result: Age-two SOR predicted autism and anxiety problems and preschool internalizing and separation anxiety diagnoses, partially mediating prenatal PSS effects on age-three outcomes, and neonatal somatomotor hand–thalamus functional connectivity was linked to later SOR.

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