Reduced multisensory facilitation in adolescents and adults on the Autism Spectrum

Abstract

Individuals with autism are reported to integrate information from visual and auditory channels in an idiosyncratic way. Multisensory integration (MSI) of simple, non-social stimuli (i.e., flashes and beeps) was evaluated in adolescents and adults with (n = 20) and without autism (n = 19) using a reaction time (RT) paradigm using audio, visual, and audiovisual stimuli. For each participant, the race model analysis compares the RTs on the audiovisual condition to a bound value computed from the unimodal RTs that reflects the effect of redundancy. If the actual audiovisual RTs are significantly faster than this bound, the race model is violated, indicating evidence of MSI. Our results show that the race model violation occurred only for the typically-developing (TD) group. While the TD group shows evidence of MSI, the autism group does not. These results suggest that multisensory integration of simple information, void of social content or complexity, is altered in autism. Individuals with autism may not benefit from the advantage conferred by multisensory stimulation to the same extent as TD individuals. Altered MSI for simple, non-social information may have cascading effects on more complex perceptual processes related to language and behaviour in autism.