Previous studies have suggested audiovisual multisensory integration (MSI) may be atypical in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, much of the research having found an alteration in MSI in ASD involved sociocommunicative stimuli. The goal of the current study was to investigate MSI abilities in ASD using lowerlevel stimuli that are not socio-communicative in nature by testing susceptibility to auditory-guided visual illusions. Adolescents and adults with ASD and typicallydeveloping (TD)individuals were shown to have similar susceptibility to a fission illusion. However, the ASD group was significantly more susceptible to the fusion illusion. Results suggest that individuals with ASD demonstrate MSI on the flashbeep illusion task but that their integration of audiovisual sensory information may be less selective than for TD individuals. Various theories attempt to explain the perceptual and sensory processing differences that make up the specific cognitive architecture of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and make the link between sensory processing and the core features (i.e., socio-communicative impairments and repetitive/restricted patterns of behaviors and interests) of ASD ( . One commonality to these cognitive theories is to hypothesize atypical sensory integration in ASD, both within and across sensory modalities (i.e., sight, hearing, touch, etc.).While research on Multisensory Integration (MSI) in ASD has expanded, there remain many questions to be answered with regard to the sensory integration capabilities of individuals with ASD. Much of the information on MSI in ASD has originated from studies examining the integration of sensory stimuli that are socio-communicative in nature (i.e., speech and faces; Brandwein et al. 2013;Mongillo et al. 2008). The McGurk effect (i.e., illusory auditory perception influenced by discordant visual information) has been one frontrunner paradigm for studying MSI in TD individuals as well as in ASD (Foxe and Molholm 2009;Iarocci and McDonald 2006). While some studies have identified a diminished McGurk effect in ASD (Bebko et al. 2014;Mongillo et al. 2008;Williams et al. 2004), others have found that the effect is contingent on developmental factors (Taylor et al. 2010), socio-communicative impairments (Iarocci et al. 2010, or task-related temporal factors (Woynaroski et al. 2013).The speech-in-noise paradigm, which is based on the facilitatory effect of multisensory stimulation, has also been used to better understand multisensory integration processes in typical development as well as in ASD. Using the speech-in noise approach to compare adolescents with Abstract Previous studies have suggested audiovisual multisensory integration (MSI) may be atypical in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, much of the research having found an alteration in MSI in ASD involved sociocommunicative stimuli. The goal of the current study was to investigate MSI abilities in ASD using lower-level stimuli that are not socio-communicative in nature by testing susceptibility to au...

Individuals with autism are reported to integrate information from visual and auditory channels in an idiosyncratic way. Multisensory integration (MSI) of simple, non-social stimuli (i.e., flashes and beeps) was evaluated in adolescents and adults with (n = 20) and without autism (n = 19) using a reaction time (RT) paradigm using audio, visual, and audiovisual stimuli. For each participant, the race model analysis compares the RTs on the audiovisual condition to a bound value computed from the unimodal RTs that reflects the effect of redundancy. If the actual audiovisual RTs are significantly faster than this bound, the race model is violated, indicating evidence of MSI. Our results show that the race model violation occurred only for the typically-developing (TD) group. While the TD group shows evidence of MSI, the autism group does not. These results suggest that multisensory integration of simple information, void of social content or complexity, is altered in autism. Individuals with autism may not benefit from the advantage conferred by multisensory stimulation to the same extent as TD individuals. Altered MSI for simple, non-social information may have cascading effects on more complex perceptual processes related to language and behaviour in autism.

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