Abstract
Recent empirical evidence suggests that autistic individuals perceive the world differently than their typically-developed peers. One theoretical account, the predictive coding hypothesis, posits that autistic individuals show a decreased reliance on previous perceptual experiences, which may relate to autism symptomatology. We tested this through a well-characterized, audiovisual statistical-learning paradigm in which typically-developed participants were first adapted to consistent temporal relationships between audiovisual stimulus pairs (audio-leading, synchronous, visual-leading) and then performed a simultaneity judgement task with audiovisual stimulus pairs varying in temporal offset from auditory-leading to visual-leading. Following exposure to the visual-leading adaptation phase, participants’ perception of synchrony was biased towards visual-leading presentations, reflecting the statistical regularities of their previously experienced environment. Importantly, the strength of adaptation was significantly related to the level of autistic traits that the participant exhibited, measured by the Autism Quotient (AQ). This was specific to the Attention to Detail subscale of the AQ that assesses the perceptual propensity to focus on fine-grain aspects of sensory input at the expense of more integrative perceptions. More severe Attention to Detail was related to weaker adaptation. These results support the predictive coding framework, and suggest that changes in sensory perception commonly reported in autism may contribute to autistic symptomatology.
Highlights
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a pervasive developmental disorder defined by two overarching characteristics: difficulties in social interactions and communication, and restricted interests and repetitive behaviours
On the other hand, exhibit decreased audiovisual temporal acuity relative to their typically-developed peers[4,5,6,17,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40]. Such decreases in multisensory temporal acuity in autism have been directly linked to their impaired ability to integrate the auditory and visual signals that characterize speech in social interactions[6,17]. We hypothesized that this concurrent decrease in multisensory temporal acuity and multisensory integration may be owing to a decreased ability to learn the statistical regularities in the environment
The stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) at which an individual was most likely to perceive the presentations as synchronous was extracted for each condition (Fig. 3B; synchronous condition (SYNC) mean = 4.07 ms, SE = 5.95 ms; AV mean = 4.38 ms, SE = 7.35 ms; visual-leading condition (VA) mean = 51.50 ms, SE = 8.87 ms), known as the Point of Subjective Simultaneity (PSS; Fig. 1A)
Summary
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a pervasive developmental disorder defined by two overarching characteristics: difficulties in social interactions and communication, and restricted interests and repetitive behaviours. On the other hand, exhibit decreased audiovisual temporal acuity relative to their typically-developed peers[4,5,6,17,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40] Such decreases in multisensory temporal acuity in autism have been directly linked to their impaired ability to integrate the auditory and visual signals that characterize speech in social interactions[6,17]. Applied to the current topic, autistic individuals may have a decreased ability to learn the statistical temporal regularities between auditory and visual inputs, resulting in difficulties to use temporal coincidence as a reliable cue to integrate sensory information across modalities. The more immersive variants of these statistical learning paradigms have not been related to autistic symptomatology[48]
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