Multisensory Temporal Integration in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

The new DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) include sensory disturbances in addition to the well-established language, communication, and social deficits. One sensory disturbance seen in ASD is an impaired ability to integrate multisensory information into a unified percept. This may arise from an underlying impairment in which individuals with ASD have difficulty perceiving the temporal relationship between cross-modal inputs, an important cue for multisensory integration. Such impairments in multisensory processing may cascade into higher-level deficits, impairing day-to-day functioning on tasks, such as speech perception. To investigate multisensory temporal processing deficits in ASD and their links to speech processing, the current study mapped performance on a number of multisensory temporal tasks (with both simple and complex stimuli) onto the ability of individuals with ASD to perceptually bind audiovisual speech signals. High-functioning children with ASD were compared with a group of typically developing children. Performance on the multisensory temporal tasks varied with stimulus complexity for both groups; less precise temporal processing was observed with increasing stimulus complexity. Notably, individuals with ASD showed a speech-specific deficit in multisensory temporal processing. Most importantly, the strength of perceptual binding of audiovisual speech observed in individuals with ASD was strongly related to their low-level multisensory temporal processing abilities. Collectively, the results represent the first to illustrate links between multisensory temporal function and speech processing in ASD, strongly suggesting that deficits in low-level sensory processing may cascade into higher-order domains, such as language and communication.

Brain dynamics in ASD during movie‐watching show idiosyncratic functional integration and segregation

“…At another moment when salient auditory and visual cues were provided together (time point 3), TD subjects showed prominent communication across sensory modules, while it did not happen in the ASD case. This last observation is well in line with recent findings of atypical multisensory integration in ASD (Stevenson et al, 2014). Importantly, as those interplays across functional systems were present in both groups of subjects, with similar dynamics, in the setting of a similar reference group of healthy subjects (Supporting Information, Figure 7), one should interpret the absence of response as a greater heterogeneity in the way ASD subjects responded to the movie.…”

Developmental Perspectives on Oxytocin and Vasopressin

“…As sensory systems are exceptionally tractable experimental targets in human neuroscience research, exploring the interaction between oxytocin and neocortical function should be a highly informative research area in the near term. For example, some individuals with autism show atypical multisensory integration in psychophysical tasks like the flash-beep illusion (Foss-Feig et al, 2010;Stevenson et al, 2014), which involves combining visual and auditory cues into a single percept. Will intranasal delivery of oxytocin narrow the window of sensory integration in these individuals, but perhaps only at younger ages when neocortical OXTR levels are highest?…”

Multisensory Integration of Low-level Information in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Measuring Susceptibility to the Flash-Beep Illusion

“…Temporal binding windows allow multisensory information to be integrated even when there might be slight temporal asynchronies . In individuals with ASD, it appears that there might be an enlarged or expanded temporal binding window as compared to TD individuals (Baum et al 2015;Foss-Feig et al 2010;Kwakye et al 2011;Stevenson et al 2014a;Wallace and Stevenson 2014). This would mean that individuals with ASD would perceive asynchronous stimuli as simultaneous more so than TD individuals would.…”

“…Whereas some of these studies demonstrated unique MSI alteration when socio-communicative stimuli were used (Bebko et al 2006;Mongillo et al 2008;Stevenson et al 2014a), others discovered a more general MSI impairment across both social and non-social tasks (de Boer-Schellekens et al 2013).…”