“Neural Noise” in Auditory Responses in Young Autistic and Neurotypical Children

Abstract

Elevated “neural noise” has been advanced as an explanation of autism and autistic sensory experiences. However, functional neuroimaging measures of neural noise may be vulnerable to contamination by recording noise. This study explored variability of electrophysiological responses to tones of different intensities in 127 autistic and 79 typically-developing children aged 2–5 years old. A rigorous data processing pipeline, including advanced visualizations of different signal sources that were maximally independent across different time lags, was used to identify and eliminate putative recording noise. Inter-trial variability was measured using median absolute deviations (MADs) of EEG amplitudes across trials and inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC). ITPC was elevated in autism in the 50 and 60 dB intensity conditions, suggesting diminished (rather than elevated) neural noise in autism, although reduced ITPC to soft 50 dB sounds was associated with increased loudness discomfort. Autistic and non-autistic participants did not differ in MADs, and indeed, the vast majority of the statistical tests examined in this study yielded no significant effects. These results appear inconsistent with the neural noise account.

Examining the Latent Structure and Correlates of Sensory Reactivity in Autism: A Multi-site Integrative Data Analysis by the Autism Sensory Research Consortium

“…Personalized interventions that seek to assess an autistic child's speci c pattern of sensory reactivity differences and ameliorate challenges associated with each domain could also be assessed within this framework, using modality-speci c assessments of each sensory response pattern to monitor the effectiveness of each putative "active ingredient" of the intervention. A shift in measurement practices will also allow researchers to associate these single-modality behavioral subconstructs with psychophysical and/or neurophysiological measures within a given modality (e.g., 74,75), informing theories of the neurocognitive underpinnings of certain types of sensory reactivity in autism (e.g., 39,149,150). Though we do not claim a single-modality perspective to be advantageous in all cases or for all research questions (particularly for those focused on "real-world" multisensory contexts), we believe that a greater diversity of theoretical approaches and frameworks within sensory autism research is needed to make optimal progress towards improving the lives of autistic people within this line of work.…”

“…In contrast to studying HYPER, HYPO, and SEEK at the supra-modal level, a minority of studies (e.g., 25,[73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80] have investigated these sensory constructs in a modality-speci c manner by calculating response pattern scores that are limited to a single sensory modality (e.g., "Auditory HYPER," which re ects the sum score of only the HYPER items within the Auditory modality). As psychophysical and neural measures of sensory function (e.g., detection thresholds, psychometric function parameters, evoked potential amplitudes) are frequently limited to a single sensory modality, some researchers theorize that the modality-speci c subconstructs represented by these measures will correlate more strongly with sensory reactivity measures that are limited to that same sensory modality rather than collapsed across modalities (e.g., visual evoked potential amplitudes may be expected to correlate moreso with a measure of Visual HYPER than with general HYPER).…”

Habituation of auditory responses in young autistic and neurotypical children

“…APP electrophysiological data have previously been presented in several studies focused on averaged ERPs (de Meo Monteil et al, 2019; Dwyer et al, 2020, Dwyer, De Meo‐Monteil, et al, 2021, Dwyer, Wang, et al, 2021) as well as a report about overall inter‐trial variability (Dwyer et al, 2022), but systematic habituation of electrophysiological responses from the APP has not previously been described.…”

“…Loudness discomfort was measured with the Sensory Profile Hyperacusis Index (SPHI; Dwyer et al, 2022; Williams et al, 2020). This measure is derived from the Short Sensory Profile (SSP; McIntosh et al, 1999), a caregiver‐report questionnaire commonly used in investigations of sensory processing in autistic children (Williams, 2021; Williams et al, 2018).…”

Probing a neural unreliability account of auditory sensory processing atypicalities in Rett Syndrome

“…For example, a number of researchers have proposed that the neural response in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be more variable, or unreliable, on a trial-to-trial basis (Haigh, Brosseau et al 2022) (Milne 2011) (Haigh, Heeger et al 2015) (but see (Butler, Molholm et al 2017) (Kovarski, Malvy et al 2019) (Dwyer, Vukusic et al 2022)). That is, it could be the case that an evoked 4 response is produced to each stimulus iteration in these conditions, but that from trial to trial, this evoked response might vary in the latencies and amplitudes of the canonical components.…”