Department of Clinical and Developmental Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Amsterdam Public Health Research Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Dutch Autism and ADHD Research Center (d'Arc), Brain & Cognition, Department of Psychology, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Eur J Neurosci. 2024 Jun;59(11):2979-2994. doi: 10.1111/ejn.16319. Epub 2024 Apr 3.
Differences between autistic and non-autistic individuals in perception of the temporal relationships between sights and sounds are theorized to underlie difficulties in integrating relevant sensory information. These, in turn, are thought to contribute to problems with speech perception and higher level social behaviour. However, the literature establishing this connection often involves limited sample sizes and focuses almost entirely on children. To determine whether these differences persist into adulthood, we compared 496 autistic and 373 non-autistic adults (aged 17 to 75 years). Participants completed an online version of the McGurk/MacDonald paradigm, a multisensory illusion indicative of the ability to integrate audiovisual speech stimuli. Audiovisual asynchrony was manipulated, and participants responded both to the syllable they perceived (revealing their susceptibility to the illusion) and to whether or not the audio and video were synchronized (allowing insight into temporal processing). In contrast with prior research with smaller, younger samples, we detected no evidence of impaired temporal or multisensory processing in autistic adults. Instead, we found that in both groups, multisensory integration correlated strongly with age. This contradicts prior presumptions that differences in multisensory perception persist and even increase in magnitude over the lifespan of autistic individuals. It also suggests that the compensatory role multisensory integration may play as the individual senses decline with age is intact. These findings challenge existing theories and provide an optimistic perspective on autistic development. They also underline the importance of expanding autism research to better reflect the age range of the autistic population.
自闭症个体与非自闭症个体在视觉和听觉之间时间关系感知上的差异，被认为是整合相关感觉信息困难的基础。这些反过来又被认为是导致语音感知和更高层次的社会行为问题的原因。然而，建立这种联系的文献通常涉及样本量有限，几乎完全集中在儿童身上。为了确定这些差异是否持续到成年期，我们比较了 496 名自闭症患者和 373 名非自闭症成年人（年龄在 17 至 75 岁之间）。参与者完成了一个在线版的麦格克/麦克唐纳范式，这是一种多感官错觉，表明能够整合视听语音刺激。我们操纵了视听时滞，并让参与者对他们感知到的音节做出反应（揭示他们对错觉的易感性），以及音频和视频是否同步（允许洞察时间处理）。与之前在较小、较年轻的样本中进行的研究不同，我们没有发现自闭症成年人在时间或多感官处理方面有任何受损的证据。相反，我们发现，在这两个群体中，多感官整合与年龄密切相关。这与先前的假设相矛盾，即多感官感知的差异在自闭症个体的整个生命周期中持续存在，甚至会增大。这也表明，随着年龄的增长，个体感官下降，多感官整合可能发挥的代偿作用是完整的。这些发现挑战了现有理论，并为自闭症的发展提供了一个乐观的视角。它们还强调了扩大自闭症研究的重要性，以更好地反映自闭症人群的年龄范围。
