Hoffmann Jonatan, Travers-Podmaniczky Gabrielle, Pelzl Michael Alexander, Brück Carolin, Jacob Heike, Hölz Lea, Martinelli Anne, Wildgruber Dirk
Department of General Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
School of Psychology, Fresenius University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Front Psychiatry. 2023 Apr 24;14:1151665. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1151665. eCollection 2023.
Deficits in emotional perception are common in autistic people, but it remains unclear to which extent these perceptual impairments are linked to specific sensory modalities, specific emotions or multisensory facilitation.
This study aimed to investigate uni- and bimodal perception of emotional cues as well as multisensory facilitation in autistic ( = 18, mean age: 36.72 years, SD: 11.36) compared to non-autistic ( = 18, mean age: 36.41 years, SD: 12.18) people using auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli.
Lower identification accuracy and longer response time were revealed in high-functioning autistic people. These differences were independent of modality and emotion and showed large effect sizes (Cohen's 0.8-1.2). Furthermore, multisensory facilitation of response time was observed in non-autistic people that was absent in autistic people, whereas no differences were found in multisensory facilitation of accuracy between the two groups.
These findings suggest that processing of auditory and visual components of audiovisual stimuli is carried out more separately in autistic individuals (with equivalent temporal demands required for processing of the respective unimodal cues), but still with similar relative improvement in accuracy, whereas earlier integrative multimodal merging of stimulus properties seems to occur in non-autistic individuals.
情绪感知缺陷在自闭症患者中很常见，但这些感知障碍在多大程度上与特定的感觉模态、特定情绪或多感官促进作用相关仍不清楚。
本研究旨在调查自闭症患者（n = 18，平均年龄：36.72岁，标准差：11.36）与非自闭症患者（n = 18，平均年龄：36.41岁，标准差：12.18）在使用听觉、视觉和视听刺激时对情绪线索的单模态和双模态感知以及多感官促进作用。
高功能自闭症患者表现出较低的识别准确率和较长的反应时间。这些差异与模态和情绪无关，且效应量较大（科恩d值为0.8 - 1.2）。此外，在非自闭症患者中观察到了反应时间的多感官促进作用，而自闭症患者中未观察到，且两组在准确率的多感官促进方面未发现差异。
这些发现表明，在自闭症个体中，视听刺激的听觉和视觉成分的处理更为独立（处理各自单模态线索所需的时间要求相当），但准确率仍有类似的相对提高，而在非自闭症个体中似乎更早地发生了刺激属性的整合多模态合并。
