The mismatch negativity and the P3a components of the auditory event-related potentials in autistic low-functioning subjects

The Relationship Between Auditory Processing and Restricted, Repetitive Behaviors in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Evidence for enhanced frequency discrimination ability of isolated pure tone stimuli has been found in children with ASD (Bonnel et al, 2003;Heaton, et al, 2008;O'Riordan and Passetti, 2006) and in adults with autism (although not in adults with Asperger's syndrome) in combined four-interval with two-forced choice (2IFC) frequency discrimination tasks (Bonnel et al, 2010). Furthermore, a similar pattern of ability has been observed also at neural levels in electrophysiological studies investigating neural response to changes of frequency in individuals with ASD, at the pre-attentive level (Ferri et al, 2003;Gomot et al, 2011;Gomot, Giard, Adrien, Barthelemy, and Bruneau, 2002;Kujala et al, 2010;Lepistö et al, 2008;.…”

“…Under this view, the preference for insistence to sameness and the repetitive behaviours people with ASD display are thought to relate to their hyper/hypo sensitivities to detect change. Studies in preattentional auditory novelty detection and pre-attentive neural responses (e.g., MMN) in children with ASD have provided evidence of enhanced (Ferri et al, 2003), intact (Ceponiene et al, 2003;Kamner, Verbaten, Cuperus, Camfferman, and van Engeland, 1995) and reduced (Gomot et al, 2006;Seri, Cerquiglini, Pisani, and Curatolo, 1999) frequency detection. A similar pattern of results is also evident in the findings across the studies on low-level discrimination ability in ASD.…”

Event Related Potentials in the Understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorders: An Analytical Review

“…In low-functioning children with autism, Gomot et al (2006) found shorted MMN latencies to pitch change (Gomot et al 2002(Gomot et al , 2006, while Ferri et al (2003) found larger MMN amplitude for pitch changes (Ferri et al 2003). In both of these studies, controls consisted of typically developing children.…”

“…In an ACRT task with high functioning children, Oades et al found a shorter N1 latency with normal performance in autism compared to age matched controls (Oades et al 1988(Oades et al , 1990. Finally, Ferri et al (2003), in a study comparing children with autism with age-matched controls, found similar shorter latency of N1 in a standard oddball paradigm, with normal reaction times and accuracies (Ferri et al 2003).…”

Fragile Spectral and Temporal Auditory Processing in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Early Language Delay

“…Superior pitch processing has been established regardless of stimulus complexity (e.g., for pure tones, complex tones, contours, nonwords, words and sentences) using a variety of psychophysical tasks (e.g., identification, discrimination, categorization, memory and labeling) (e.g., Bonnel et al 2003Bonnel et al , 2010Heaton 2005;Heaton et al 2008a, b, c;Järvinen-Pasley and Heaton 2007;Jones et al 2009;O'Riordan and Passetti 2006;Stanutz et al 2014). The majority of research using event-related potentials (ERP) also revealed enhanced neural detection of frequency changes in ASD at the pre-attentive level (using mismatch negativity or MMN) (e.g., Ferri et al 2003;Gomot et al 2002;Kujala et al 2007; but see Jansson-Verkasalo et al 2003; see Haesen et al 2011 for an extensive recent review of the psychophysical and electrophysiological literature on auditory processing in ASD). Relevant is also the increased prevalence of absolute pitch and musical savants in the ASD population (e.g., DePape et al 2012;Heaton et al 2008a, b, c;Miller 1989;Mottron et al 2013) and the increased prevalence of autistic traits among possessors of absolute pitch (e.g., Dohn et al 2012).…”