Disrupted integration of exteroceptive and interoceptive signaling in autism spectrum disorder.
Jean-Paul Noel, Marisa Lytle, Carissa Cascio and 1 others
PMID 29030901WHAT IT FOUND
People with autism judged their own heartbeat and a visual event as simultaneous over a time window over 4 times larger than controls.
They could still count their heartbeats, and heartbeat awareness was strongly related to heartbeat-vision timing.
Key findings
01People with ASD judged sound and light as simultaneous over a larger time window than controls (163.44 milliseconds versus 143.20 milliseconds).
02The heartbeat-vision time window was over 4 times larger in ASD than controls (721.07 milliseconds versus 168.18 milliseconds).
03Healthy individuals with high versus low autistic traits did not show a heartbeat-vision time-window difference (239.40 milliseconds versus 242.84 milliseconds), but high-trait participants reported peak synchrony less often.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
Only high-functioning individuals with ASD were tested, so the result may not apply to people with lower cognitive ability or different ages. The ASD and control groups were not explicitly matched for IQ, and only ASD participants received cognitive testing. Alexithymia was not measured, even though the paper notes it may be closely related to interoceptive difficulties in ASD. Participants had to monitor their pulse, which could make the heartbeat-vision task partly tactile; the authors added vision-touch controls but did not eliminate this concern. Only a small subset of ASD participants completed the heartbeat counting task, and no control participants completed it. Experiment 2 did not reproduce the large heartbeat-vision time-window difference in healthy adults with high versus low autistic traits. The study did not test an intervention.
Declared interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests. The paper reports NIH extramural support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that autism causes a general interoception deficit or that heartbeat-awareness training would improve sensory integration. The study compared lab timing tasks, not treatments, and the heartbeat counting subset showed intact interoceptive awareness.