Atypical mismatch negativity in response to emotional voices in people with autism spectrum conditions.

Yang-Teng Fan,Yawei Cheng,Piia Susanna Astikainen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102471

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are characterized by heterogeneous impairments of social reciprocity and sensory processing. Voices, similar to faces, convey socially relevant information. Whether voice processing is selectively impaired remains undetermined. This study involved recording mismatch negativity (MMN) while presenting emotionally spoken syllables dada and acoustically matched nonvocal sounds to 20 subjects with ASC and 20 healthy matched controls. The people with ASC exhibited no MMN response to emotional syllables and reduced MMN to nonvocal sounds, indicating general impairments of affective voice and acoustic discrimination. Weaker angry MMN amplitudes were associated with more autistic traits. Receiver operator characteristic analysis revealed that angry MMN amplitudes yielded a value of 0.88 (p<.001). The results suggest that people with ASC may process emotional voices in an atypical fashion already at the automatic stage. This processing abnormality can facilitate diagnosing ASC and enable social deficits in people with ASC to be predicted.

Highlights

In Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC), abnormalities in social skills usually coexist with atypical sensory processing and aberrant attention
To comprehensively understand the pathophysiology of autism, determining whether voice processing is selectively impaired in people diagnosed with ASC and whether this impairment is associated with sensory dysfunction and attention abnormalities is necessary
Neurophysiological Measures event-related brain potentials (ERPs) amplitudes were subjected to an ANOVA in which the category, stimulus, and electrode (Fz, Cz, or Pz) were repeated measure factors and the group (ASC vs. control) was the betweensubject factor

Summary

Introduction

In Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC), abnormalities in social skills usually coexist with atypical sensory processing and aberrant attention. To comprehensively understand the pathophysiology of autism, determining whether voice processing is selectively impaired in people diagnosed with ASC and whether this impairment is associated with sensory dysfunction and attention abnormalities is necessary. Previous studies have suggested that ASC causes difficulty in encoding and representing the sensory features of physically complex stimuli [6]. Such a deficit causes people with autism to have a disadvantage when processing social information, because affective facial and vocal expressions are multifaceted. Studies on social-stimulus-specific deficits resulted from ASC have not distinguished sensory from attention processes nor have they evaluated the effects of physical stimulus complexity on their brain responses [5,12]

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