Auditory Attentional Disengagement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Brandon Keehn, Girija Kadlaskar, Rebecca McNally Keehn and 1 others
PMID 31201579WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism showed no significant delay in shifting eye movements to sounds compared to typically developing peers.
However, they failed to look toward the sound more often when the background noise continued, suggesting difficulty disengaging from unpredictable auditory targets.
Key findings
01There was no significant difference in saccadic reaction time between children with ASD and typically developing children.
02Children with ASD had a significantly higher percentage of trials where they did not shift their eyes to the target sound, specifically when the central fixation sound continued to play.
03A combined measure of reaction time and failure to shift showed children with ASD had a significantly larger gap effect than typically developing children.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study may be underpowered to detect small differences in reaction time, as the authors note a medium effect size that did not reach statistical significance. The auditory stimuli were simple tones and white noise, which may not reflect the complexity of real-world social sounds like speech. The groups were matched on IQ, which may limit the generalizability to children with ASD who have intellectual disabilities.
Declared interests
All authors report no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of significant difference in reaction time as evidence that auditory attention is intact in ASD. The study found that children with ASD failed to shift their eyes to the target more often than their peers in specific conditions, indicating a genuine difficulty with disengagement that reaction time alone missed.