Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Center of Neurodevelopmental Disorders at Karolinska Institutet (KIND), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2018 Aug;59(8):872-880. doi: 10.1111/jcpp.12863. Epub 2018 Jan 23.
Effective multisensory processing develops in infancy and is thought to be important for the perception of unified and multimodal objects and events. Previous research suggests impaired multisensory processing in autism, but its role in the early development of the disorder is yet uncertain. Here, using a prospective longitudinal design, we tested whether reduced visual attention to audiovisual synchrony is an infant marker of later-emerging autism diagnosis.
We studied 10-month-old siblings of children with autism using an eye tracking task previously used in studies of preschoolers. The task assessed the effect of manipulations of audiovisual synchrony on viewing patterns while the infants were observing point light displays of biological motion. We analyzed the gaze data recorded in infancy according to diagnostic status at 3 years of age (DSM-5).
Ten-month-old infants who later received an autism diagnosis did not orient to audiovisual synchrony expressed within biological motion. In contrast, both infants at low-risk and high-risk siblings without autism at follow-up had a strong preference for this type of information. No group differences were observed in terms of orienting to upright biological motion.
This study suggests that reduced orienting to audiovisual synchrony within biological motion is an early sign of autism. The findings support the view that poor multisensory processing could be an important antecedent marker of this neurodevelopmental condition.
有效的多感官处理在婴儿期发展，并被认为对于感知统一和多模态的物体和事件很重要。先前的研究表明，自闭症患者的多感官处理受损，但它在该障碍的早期发展中的作用尚不确定。在这里，我们使用前瞻性纵向设计，测试了对视听同步的视觉注意力减少是否是自闭症后期诊断的婴儿标志物。
我们使用先前在学龄前儿童研究中使用的眼动追踪任务，研究了自闭症儿童的 10 个月大的兄弟姐妹。该任务评估了在观察生物运动的点光显示时，视听同步的操纵对观看模式的影响。我们根据 3 岁时的诊断状况（DSM-5）分析了婴儿期记录的注视数据。
以后被诊断为自闭症的 10 个月大的婴儿没有定向到生物运动中表达的视听同步。相比之下，在随访中没有自闭症的低风险和高风险兄弟姐妹都强烈偏爱这种类型的信息。在定向到直立的生物运动方面，各组之间没有差异。
这项研究表明，对生物运动中的视听同步的定向减少是自闭症的早期迹象。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即多感官处理不佳可能是这种神经发育状况的一个重要先行标志物。
