Department of Neurophysiology & Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany.
Autism Res. 2011 Oct;4(5):383-8. doi: 10.1002/aur.210. Epub 2011 Aug 31.
Individuals suffering from autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often show a tendency for detail- or feature-based perception (also referred to as "local processing bias") instead of more holistic stimulus processing typical for unaffected people. This local processing bias has been demonstrated for the visual and auditory domains and there is evidence that multisensory processing may also be affected in ASD. Most multisensory processing paradigms used social-communicative stimuli, such as human speech or faces, probing the processing of simultaneously occuring sensory signals. Multisensory processing, however, is not limited to simultaneous stimulation. In this study, we investigated whether multisensory processing deficits in ASD persist when semantically complex but nonsocial stimuli are presented in succession. Fifteen adult individuals with Asperger syndrome and 15 control persons participated in a visual-audio priming task, which required the classification of sounds that were either primed by semantically congruent or incongruent preceding pictures of objects. As expected, performance on congruent trials was faster and more accurate compared with incongruent trials (crossmodal priming effect). The Asperger group, however, did not differ significantly from the control group. Our results do not support a general multisensory processing deficit, which is universal to the entire autism spectrum.
患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的个体通常表现出对细节或特征的感知倾向（也称为“局部加工偏见”），而不是未受影响的人典型的更整体的刺激加工。这种局部加工偏见已在视觉和听觉领域得到证明，并且有证据表明，多感官处理在 ASD 中也可能受到影响。大多数多感官处理范式使用社交交流刺激，例如人类言语或面孔，探测同时发生的感官信号的处理。然而，多感官处理不仅限于同时刺激。在这项研究中，我们调查了当呈现连续的语义复杂但非社交刺激时，ASD 中的多感官处理缺陷是否仍然存在。15 名患有艾斯伯格综合征的成年人和 15 名对照者参加了视觉-听觉启动任务，该任务要求对声音进行分类，这些声音要么是由语义一致的物体图片预先启动，要么是由语义不一致的图片预先启动。正如预期的那样，与不一致的试验相比，一致试验的表现更快且更准确（跨模态启动效应）。然而，艾斯伯格组与对照组之间没有显著差异。我们的结果不支持普遍存在于整个自闭症谱系的普遍多感官处理缺陷。
