Developmental Recovery of Impaired Multisensory Processing in Autism and the Cost of Switching Sensory Modality

Abstract

11Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often impaired in their ability to cope with and process 12 multisensory information, which may contribute to some of the social and communicative deficits that 13 are prevalent in this population. Amelioration of such deficits in adolescence has been observed for 14 ecologically-relevant stimuli such as speech. However, it is not yet known if this recovery generalizes to 15 the processing of nonsocial stimuli such as more basic beeps and flashes, typically used in cognitive 16 neuroscience research. We hypothesize that engagement of different neural processes and lack of 17 environmental exposure to such artificial stimuli leads to protracted developmental trajectories in both 18 neurotypical (NT) individuals and individuals with ASD, thus delaying the age at which we observe this 19 "catch up". Here, we test this hypothesis using a bisensory detection task by measuring human response 20 times to randomly presented auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli. By measuring the behavioral gain 21 afforded by an audiovisual signal, we show that the multisensory deficit previously reported in children 22with ASD recovers in adulthood by the mid-twenties. In addition, we examine the effects of switching 23 between sensory modalities and show that teenagers with ASD incur less of a behavioral cost than their 24 NT peers. Computational modelling reveals that multisensory information interacts according to different 25 rules in children and adults, and that sensory evidence is weighted differently too. In ASD, weighting of 26 sensory information and allocation of attention during multisensory processing differs to that of NT 27 individuals. Based on our findings, we propose a theoretical framework of multisensory development in 28 NT and ASD individuals. 29

What you see is what you hear: Twenty years of research using the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion

“…Similar SIFI perception has been reported between adults diagnosed with ASD and controls (Keane et al, 2010;van Der Smagt et al, 2007), although this may be specific to fission than fusion effects (Bao et al, 2017). It has been suggested that individuals diagnosed with ASD undergo a developmental delay in sensory processing, with multisensory abilities reaching age-normal levels by mid-twenties (Crosse et al, 2019). Findings from studies using the SIFI therefore support this conclusion.…”

The Effect of Visual Perceptual Load on Auditory Awareness of Social vs. Non-social Stimuli in Individuals with Autism

“…While our findings suggest superior perceptual processing in ASD, in line with theories of enhanced local processing (Happé and Frith 2006 ; Mottron et al 2006 ), there are studies to suggest that perceptual processing is impaired in ASD (Haigh et al 2015 ), and particularly multisensory integration (Stevenson et al 2014 ; Noel et al 2018 ; Crosse et al 2019 ). However, it is important to point out that work on multisensory integration in ASD differs considerably in terms of task requirements from an inattentional deafness task used here: the former typically results in enhanced perception of one stimulus in the presence of a stimulus in a different modality, while the latter is a selective attention task in which the additional auditory CS does not facilitate processing of the visual stimulus, or vice versa.…”

The neural mechanisms of audiotactile binding depend on asynchrony

“…Likewise, the predictions of the race model were “violated” for asynchronies ≤70 ms. Both of these analyses suggest that observers experience benefits in audiotactile processing for TIW of ≤70 ms, though some of these reaction time differences may reflect modality switching costs as a result of random ordering the auditory, tactile and audiotactile conditions (Shaw et al, 2020; Crosse, Foxe, & Molholm, 2019).…”