Ujiie Yuta, Asai Tomohisa, Wakabayashi Akio
Information Processing and Computer Sciences, Graduate School of Advanced Integration Science, Chiba University Chiba, Japan ; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Tokyo, Japan.
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation Kanagawa, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jun 30;6:891. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00891. eCollection 2015.
The McGurk effect is a well-known illustration that demonstrates the influence of visual information on hearing in the context of speech perception. Some studies have reported that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display abnormal processing of audio-visual speech integration, while other studies showed contradictory results. Based on the dimensional model of ASD, we administered two analog studies to examine the link between level of autistic traits, as assessed by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), and the McGurk effect among a sample of university students. In the first experiment, we found that autistic traits correlated negatively with fused (McGurk) responses. Then, we manipulated presentation types of visual stimuli to examine whether the local bias toward visual speech cues modulated individual differences in the McGurk effect. The presentation included four types of visual images, comprising no image, mouth only, mouth and eyes, and full face. The results revealed that global facial information facilitates the influence of visual speech cues on McGurk stimuli. Moreover, individual differences between groups with low and high levels of autistic traits appeared when the full-face visual speech cue with an incongruent voice condition was presented. These results suggest that individual differences in the McGurk effect might be due to a weak ability to process global facial information in individuals with high levels of autistic traits.
麦格克效应是一个著名的例证，它展示了视觉信息在言语感知背景下对听觉的影响。一些研究报告称，自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者在视听言语整合过程中表现出异常处理，而其他研究则得出了矛盾的结果。基于ASD的维度模型，我们进行了两项模拟研究，以检验在大学生样本中，通过自闭症谱系商数（AQ）评估的自闭症特征水平与麦格克效应之间的联系。在第一个实验中，我们发现自闭症特征与融合（麦格克）反应呈负相关。然后，我们操纵视觉刺激的呈现类型，以检查对视觉言语线索的局部偏向是否调节了麦格克效应中的个体差异。呈现包括四种视觉图像类型，即无图像、仅嘴巴、嘴巴和眼睛以及全脸。结果显示，整体面部信息促进了视觉言语线索对麦格克刺激的影响。此外，当呈现具有不一致语音条件的全脸视觉言语线索时，自闭症特征水平低和高的组之间出现了个体差异。这些结果表明，麦格克效应中的个体差异可能是由于自闭症特征水平高的个体处理整体面部信息的能力较弱。
