“…Several studies using electrophysiology and brain imaging data from ASD patients have revealed significant changes in sensory stimuli processing (Mamashli et al, 2017;Stickel et al, 2019;Pierce et al, 2021), specifically involving altered auditory perceptual capacity and deficits in auditory discrimination tasks, especially in the presence of noise (Gonçalves and Monteiro, 2023). In accordance with these findings, auditory alterations have been reported across several animal models of ASD, such as hyperacusis in Fmr1-KO rodents (Auerbach et al, 2021;Wilde et al, 2022), increased pitch discrimination abilities in Shank3B-KO mice (Rendall et al, 2019), increased thresholds for tone-evoked cortical responses in Mecp2 transgenic mice (Zhou C. et al, 2019), and auditory processing impairments in Cntnap2-KO rodents (Scott et al, 2018) as well as several Shank3 transgenic models (Castro and Monteiro, 2022). Our results expand these observations by revealing an auditory behavioral avoidance phenotype in Shank3 KO mice carrying a human ASD mutation in the Shank3 gene.…”