Atypical rapid audio-visual temporal recalibration in autism spectrum disorders.
Jean-Paul Noel, Matthew A De Niear, Ryan Stevenson and 2 others
PMID 27156926WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic children and adolescents shifted their sense of whether sounds and sights happened together less than peers after a preceding mismatch for simple beeps and hammer videos.
For spoken syllables, their shift matched peers, but their judged-synchronous window was wider.
Key findings
01After a previous trial with one sense leading, the ASD group shifted its judged-simultaneous point less than the TD group for flash-beep and hammer-tool stimuli, but not for speech.
02For speech stimuli, the ASD group's temporal binding window averaged 265.69 ms, compared with 228.54 ms for the TD group; no group difference appeared for hammer-tool or flash-beep windows.
03The size of the temporal binding window was not significantly related to the amount of rapid recalibration in either group or across stimulus types.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample was small, with 26 autistic and 26 typically developing children and adolescents. The participants were 7 to 17 years old, so age-related differences may be hidden when all ages are analyzed together. The groups were not matched for gender, although the paper reports no gender differences in the measures. The ASD group had lower vocabulary scores than the TD group, which could affect speech tasks. The previous-trial analysis could not examine each specific sound-sight delay because there were too few repetitions per condition. The overall ASD-versus-TD difference in rapid recalibration was only a trend; the significant finding came from a stimulus-type interaction. The study measured laboratory timing judgments, not speech-language therapy outcomes.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these lab timing differences as proof that sensory training will help autistic children. The study measured judgments of sound and sight timing, not treatment effects, and speech recalibration was not different between groups.