Sensory over-responsivity (SOR)
An exteroceptive construct — over-responsivity to external sensory stimuli (sounds, textures, smells) — that earns a place in an interoception wiki because it runs the same argument the interoceptive literature runs, on the other side of the skin: a sensory feature that cuts across psychiatric diagnoses, predicts risk prospectively, and implicates the salience and sensory networks. Held on one source, Schwarzlose et al. (2023).
What it is
SOR is atypical, distressing negative reaction to sensory input that most people find innocuous — a seam in a sock, a vacuum cleaner, a smell. It is a DSM-5 diagnostic feature of autism, but is also present in an estimated 15–20% of typically developing children, where it tracks anxiety, depression, OCD and ADHD symptoms. Its interoceptive counterpart in autism — atypical processing of internal sensation — is on autism-interoception; both are read through the same “autism as a disorder of prediction” lens, which is the reason to keep them side by side. The clinical question SOR poses — is it a byproduct of dysregulation, a sliver of subthreshold autism, or an independent sensory risk factor? — is the exteroceptive twin of the cause-or-consequence problem that dominates interoceptive-psychopathology.
Schwarzlose et al. adjudicate the three accounts in 11,210 ABCD children and land on the sensory-specific one: SOR predicts psychiatric symptoms beyond both existing symptoms and autistic traits, associates differentially across disorders (positively with anxiety/depression/OCD/ADHD, negatively with conduct disorder), forecasts future anxiety, and carries a sensory-network functional-connectivity signature.
Its neural signature, and why it matters here
The FC profile (severe SOR, replicated across scans 2 years apart) is a sensory-and-salience story:
- Reduced connectivity within and between sensorimotor networks — read as reduced coordination among tactile-processing areas.
- Enhanced sensorimotor-hand↔salience coupling and within–ventral-attention coupling — read as the salience/attention system directing attention toward innocuous sensory input it should ignore.
- Enhanced cingulo-opercular↔amygdala coupling — proposed to promote atypical error signalling and “not-just-right” sensory experiences.
- Altered sensory-network↔hippocampus coupling — read through a sensory-prediction lens (Sinha et al.’s “autism as a disorder of prediction”): the hippocampus supports experience-based modulation of sensory cortex, so atypical coupling may impair adaptive down-modulation of sensory input.
The relevance to interoception is the shared machinery. The interoceptive over-responsivity the wiki catalogues — anxiety-sensitivity, panic’s cardiac hypervigilance — is theorised (on salience-network, computational-psychiatry) as a precision failure: the salience network assigns too much weight to interoceptive prediction error. SOR is the same failure shape on exteroceptive input, in the same nodes (salience, ventral attention, amygdala). That parallel cuts two ways. It supports treating salience-precision as a domain-general vulnerability — but it also warns that “interoceptive dysfunction across disorders” (Nord et al.) may be one face of a broader sensory-precision dysfunction that is not interoception-specific. See is-interoception-domain-general.
Held loosely
Everything above rests on a single parent-report Likert item for SOR, never validated against multi-item instruments — a thin measure for a large claim. The FC is correlational, cause-and-consequence is unresolved, and SOR remains, definitionally, about the outside of the body. This page exists to keep the exteroceptive parallel visible, not to import it as an interoceptive result.