Abstract
The alerting network, a subcomponent of attention, enables humans to respond to novel information. Children with ASD have shown equivalent alerting in response to visual and/or auditory stimuli compared to typically developing (TD) children. However, it is unclear whether children with ASD and TD show equivalent alerting to tactile stimuli. We examined (1) whether tactile cues affect accuracy and reaction times in children with ASD and TD, (2) whether the duration between touch-cues and auditory targets impacts performance, and (3) whether behavioral responses in the tactile cueing task are associated with ASD symptomatology. Six- to 12-year-olds with ASD and TD participated in a tactile-cueing task and were instructed to respond with a button press to a target sound /a/. Tactile cues were presented at 200, 400, and 800 ms (25% each) prior to the auditory target. The remaining trials (25%) were presented without tactile cues. Findings suggested that both groups showed equivalent alerting responses to tactile cues. Additionally, all children were faster to respond to auditory targets at longer cue–target intervals. Finally, there was an association between rate of facilitation and RRB scores in all children, suggesting that patterns of responding to transient phasic cues may be related to ASD symptomatology.
Highlights
Adaptive allocation of attention to information in one’s environment is critical to the development of cognitive and socio-communicative skills [1,2,3]
In Keehn et al [19], an association was observed between alerting score and the Social Domain score on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule [22], with reduced efficiency of the alerting network being associated with greater social impairments in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [19]. These findings suggest that children with ASD are able to use auditory and visual cues to facilitate attentional responses within [19,20] and across [17,18] modalities, and that differences in alerting network efficiency may be related to the socio-communicative impairments observed in ASD
Independent sample t-tests showed a greater number sensory symptoms in the tactile and auditory domains based on the Sensory Profile-2 (SP-2) for children with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) children (touch, t(28) = 5.15, p < 0. 001, d = 1.86; audition, t(28) = 7.66, p < 0.001, d = 2.63; Table 1)
Summary
Adaptive allocation of attention to information in one’s environment is critical to the development of cognitive and socio-communicative skills [1,2,3]. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) typically show early and pervasive impairments in attention [5,6,7] These differences in attention are often associated with ASD symptomatology [5,8], and have been argued to play a key role in the emergence of the ASD phenotype [9]. Presentation of transient auditory cues either slightly before or simultaneously with visual targets has been shown to impact perception, resulting in faster behavioral responses [14,15,16]. These findings regarding differences in reaction times between cue and no-cue conditions reflect both phasic and tonic alerting [13]. Transient sensory inputs stimulate alerting responses, thereby improving the processing speed of incoming sensory information after salient events
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