Brief Report: Cross-Modal Capture: Preliminary Evidence of Inefficient Filtering in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Brandon Keehn, Marissa Westerfield, Jeanne Townsend
PMID 30014248WHAT IT FOUND
When children ignored sounds, groups did not differ overall, but children with autism were slowed more by mismatched sounds at some delays.
They were not slower when asked to judge sound-picture matches. Small study, so preliminary.
Key findings
01In the visual attention task, children with ASD were significantly less accurate when the sound was simultaneous (88%) than when it was delayed to 250ms (92%), while typically developing children stayed at 92%.
02When children had to judge whether sound and picture matched, accuracy did not differ between the ASD and typically developing groups (ASD 84%, typically developing 84%), and response time also did not differ.
03When ignoring sounds, children with ASD showed greater slowing by mismatched sounds than typically developing children at 50ms and 175ms delays.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The authors say the findings are preliminary and should be interpreted with caution because the analysed sample was small (18 children with ASD and 19 typically developing children). The two tasks were not identical: the visual attention task had 552 trials and used several sound delays, while the integrated attention task had 200 trials and used only simultaneous presentation. The study used computer-presented pictures and sounds from one source, not separate real-world sound sources. In the visual task, overall group differences were not significant; delay-specific slowing appeared at 50ms and 175ms.
Declared interests
The authors declared no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that autistic children have a general cross-modal filtering deficit. The visual task showed no overall group difference, only preliminary delay-specific differences at 50ms and 175ms, and the integrated task showed no group difference in accuracy or response time.