Abstract
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by difficulties in social cognition, but are also associated with atypicalities in sensory and perceptual processing. Several groups have reported that autistic individuals show reduced integration of socially relevant audiovisual signals, which may contribute to the higher-order social and cognitive difficulties observed in autism. Here we use a newly devised technique to study instantaneous adaptation to audiovisual asynchrony in autism. Autistic and typical participants were presented with sequences of brief visual and auditory stimuli, varying in asynchrony over a wide range, from 512 ms auditory-lead to 512 ms auditory-lag, and judged whether they seemed to be synchronous. Typical adults showed strong adaptation effects, with trials proceeded by an auditory-lead needing more auditory-lead to seem simultaneous, and vice versa. However, autistic observers showed little or no adaptation, although their simultaneity curves were as narrow as the typical adults. This result supports recent Bayesian models that predict reduced adaptation effects in autism. As rapid audiovisual recalibration may be fundamental for the optimisation of speech comprehension, recalibration problems could render language processing more difficult in autistic individuals, hindering social communication.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by difficulties in social cognition, but are associated with atypicalities in sensory and perceptual processing
Several groups have reported that autistic individuals show reduced integration of socially relevant audiovisual signals, which may contribute to the higher-order social and cognitive difficulties observed in autism
As rapid audiovisual recalibration may be fundamental for the optimisation of speech comprehension, recalibration problems could render language processing more difficult in autistic individuals, hindering social communication
Summary
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by difficulties in social cognition, but are associated with atypicalities in sensory and perceptual processing. Most adaptation studies use prolonged exposure to asynchronous audiovisual signals, Van der Burg et al.[10] have introduced a new technique showing that rapid adaptation to asynchronous audiovisual events, occurs more rapidly than was previously thought, even with audiovisual speech[11] They presented participants with a stream of audiovisual events with variable asynchrony and asked them to judge if they appear synchronous. Difficulties in multisensory processing, early in development, might lead to problems in social and adaptive behaviour and interpersonal interactions that occur in autism Some evidence for such difficulties comes from studies on multisensory integration of speech and emotions, perceived from the face and the voice[13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. Given the importance of multisensory interaction for communication, it is possible that atypical multisensory integration could underlie some of the perceptual and cognitive differences associated with autism
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