Matyjek Magdalena, Kita Sotaro, Cuello Mireia Torralba, Faraco Salvador Soto
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Autism Res. 2025 Jun;18(6):1156-1169. doi: 10.1002/aur.70042. Epub 2025 Apr 17.
Seeing the speaker often facilitates auditory speech comprehension through audio-visual integration. This audio-visual facilitation is stronger under challenging listening conditions, such as in real-life social environments. Autism has been associated with atypicalities in integrating audio-visual information, potentially underlying social difficulties in this population. The present study investigated multisensory integration (MSI) of audio-visual speech information among autistic and neurotypical adults. Participants performed a speech-in-noise task in a realistic multispeaker social scenario with audio-visual, auditory, or visual trials while their brain activity was recorded using EEG. The neurotypical group demonstrated a non-linear audio-visual effect in alpha oscillations, whereas the autistic group showed merely additive processing. Despite these differences in neural correlates, both groups achieved similar behavioral audio-visual facilitation outcomes. These findings suggest that although autistic and neurotypical brains might process multisensory cues differently, they achieve comparable benefits from audio-visual speech. These results contribute to the growing body of literature on MSI atypicalities in autism.
看到说话者通常通过视听整合促进听觉言语理解。这种视听促进在具有挑战性的听力条件下更强，例如在现实生活中的社交环境中。自闭症与视听信息整合异常有关，这可能是该人群社交困难的潜在原因。本研究调查了自闭症和神经典型成年人之间视听言语信息的多感官整合（MSI）。参与者在一个逼真的多说话者社交场景中执行噪声中的言语任务，包括视听、听觉或视觉试验，同时使用脑电图记录他们的大脑活动。神经典型组在阿尔法振荡中表现出非线性视听效应，而自闭症组仅表现出相加处理。尽管神经关联存在这些差异，但两组在行为上的视听促进结果相似。这些发现表明，尽管自闭症和神经典型大脑处理多感官线索的方式可能不同，但它们从视听言语中获得了相当的益处。这些结果为关于自闭症中MSI异常的文献不断增加做出了贡献。
