School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Sep;54(9):3400-3411. doi: 10.1007/s10803-023-06075-7. Epub 2023 Aug 29.
Previous studies reported mixed findings on autistic individuals' pitch perception relative to neurotypical (NT) individuals. We investigated whether this may be partly due to individual differences in cognitive abilities by comparing their performance on various pitch perception tasks on a large sample (n = 164) of autistic and NT children and adults. Our findings revealed that: (i) autistic individuals either showed similar or worse performance than NT individuals on the pitch tasks; (ii) cognitive abilities were associated with some pitch task performance; and (iii) cognitive abilities modulated the relationship between autism diagnosis and pitch perception on some tasks. Our findings highlight the importance of taking an individual differences approach to understand the strengths and weaknesses of pitch processing in autism.
先前的研究报告称,自闭症个体在音高感知方面与神经典型(NT)个体存在混合的发现。我们通过对大量自闭症和 NT 儿童和成人样本(n=164)在各种音高感知任务上的表现进行比较,探究了这是否部分归因于认知能力的个体差异。我们的发现表明:(i)自闭症个体在音高任务上的表现要么与 NT 个体相似,要么更差;(ii)认知能力与某些音高任务表现相关;(iii)认知能力调节了自闭症诊断与某些任务上的音高感知之间的关系。我们的研究结果强调了采用个体差异方法来理解自闭症个体在音高处理方面的优缺点的重要性。