School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK.
School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK.
Cortex. 2018 Oct;107:121-130. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.10.008. Epub 2017 Oct 25.
Synaesthesia and autism are two neurodevelopmental conditions that have been shown to co-occur more than expected by chance. The studies reported here test the hypothesis that increased sensory sensitivity and enhanced Attention-to-detail are core cognitive features that are shared between them. In Study 1, we administer self-report measures of sensory sensitivity and autistic traits (the Autism Spectrum Quotient, AQ) to a large heterogeneous sample of synaesthetes. Both sensory sensitivity and the Attention-to-detail subscale of the AQ show a "dose-like" relationship with synaesthesia: namely, more kinds of synaesthesia is related to a greater shift up the autistic spectrum. Study 2 uses two objective measures of visual perception/attention linked to autistic traits: Change Blindness and detection of local embedded figures. Both measures are shown here to be sensitive to the Attention-to-detail subscale of the AQ, and synaesthetes outperformed controls on both tasks. Synaesthetes appear to occupy a specific cognitive niche of having autistic-like traits linked to enhanced perception and attention. Whilst these typically occur in the absence of the traditional impairments that define autism, they may carry the cost of increased vulnerability to clinical levels of autism (Odds Ratio = 2.07).
联觉和自闭症是两种神经发育状况，它们的同时发生比预期的机会要多。这里报告的研究检验了这样一个假设，即增加的感官敏感性和增强的细节注意力是它们之间共有的核心认知特征。在研究 1 中，我们向大量异质的联觉者样本施测了自我报告的感官敏感性和自闭症特征（自闭症谱系商数，AQ）的测量。感官敏感性和 AQ 的细节注意力子量表都与联觉表现出一种“剂量样”关系：即，更多种类的联觉与自闭症谱系上更大的转变有关。研究 2 使用了与自闭症特征相关的两种客观的视觉感知/注意力测量方法：变化盲和局部嵌入式图形检测。这两种方法都显示出对 AQ 的细节注意力子量表的敏感性，联觉者在这两个任务上的表现都优于对照组。联觉者似乎占据了一个特定的认知位置，具有与增强的感知和注意力相关的自闭症样特征。虽然这些特征通常在没有定义自闭症的传统障碍的情况下出现，但它们可能会增加对自闭症临床水平的脆弱性（优势比=2.07）。
