Correlation and Predictive Ability Between Sensory Characteristics and Social Interaction of Children in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Background: As a kind of neurodevelopmental disorder, the deficiency of social interaction and communication ability is the core symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, ASD usually has sensory abnormalities, which may be an important influencing factor of social function. Here, the aim of the current study is to explore the abnormal sensory characteristics of ASD children and the correlation between social behavior. And further clarify the predictive effect of sensory expression on ASD social ability.Methods: A case-control study was conducted, with children aged 3 to 10 years including ASD and typical development (TD) as subjects. We used Short Sensory Profile (SSP) questionnaire to evaluate the sensory characteristics in ASD group and TD group. And Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) was employed to assess the social function of ASD. The differences of SSP scores between two groups of children were compared, and the correlation between SSP in ASD group and SRS was further analyzed. Furthermore, by constructing random forest classification model and support vector machine classification model, the predictive ability of each perception on social level is discussed.Results: Significant differences were found between ASD children and TD children in the performance of each sensory field. The abnormal sensory rate of children in ASD group is as high as 91.4%, and 74% of them are accompanied by sensory disorders in multiple dimensions.It is worth noting that there is a significant negative correlation between the scores of ASD group children in all dimensions of SSP and the scores of SRS scale. Evaluation and comparison results of full-feature and 7-feature models show that the random forest model and SVM model with all-feature factors have higher sensitivity, while the random forest model with 7-feature factors has the highest specificity. Moreover, the maximum of area value under (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve between the four models up to 0.859, suggest that the good prediction effect of the models.Conclusion: Our results suggest autism children have obvious abnormalities in many sensory fields, and there is a significant correlation between this atypical sensory performance and social function. The social level of this group can be well predicted by their sensory characteristics.