The Influence of Noise on Autonomic Arousal and Cognitive Performance in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Jessica M Keith, Jeremy P Jamieson, Loisa Bennetto
PMID 30047097WHAT IT FOUND
Adolescents with ASD and matched peers showed similar working memory changes when 75 dB noise was added.
Noise improved the easier task and tended to worsen the harder task, but only the ASD group had rising heart rate on the harder noisy task.
Key findings
01Noise did not affect working memory scores differently in adolescents with ASD than in typically developing peers across easy and hard tasks.
02Across both groups, noise improved scores on the easier Forward Span task and tended to lower scores on the harder Backward Span task.
03During the harder Backward Span with noise, only the ASD group showed continued increases in heart rate, and in that group higher skin conductance was associated with lower Backward Span scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The study included 25 adolescents with ASD and 21 typically developing adolescents, so it is small for drawing firm conclusions about all adolescents with ASD. All participants had Full Scale IQ above 80, so the findings may not apply to adolescents with ASD who have lower cognitive ability or more severe support needs. The ASD group included participants with speech or language, learning, ADHD, anxiety or OCD diagnoses, and 12 were taking psychotropic medications, so these factors could affect arousal or performance. Some physiological data were missing or unusable: three participants were missing heart rate data, four had unusable skin conductance, and several participants were electrodermal non-responders. The noise was 75 dB intermittent non-speech broadband noise, not speech or social classroom noise, so it does not fully mimic everyday school or workplace sound. The cognitive task was visual number span, not a real communication, learning or work task, and the study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show long-term effects or how these patterns change with age.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that noise impairs working memory more in adolescents with ASD than in typically developing peers. The key performance interaction was null, F(1,44)=0.01, p=.94, and Bayes factors supported no group difference in noise effects. Noise improved the easier task and only tended to worsen the harder task across both groups. The ASD group did show higher heart rate reactivity and a negative skin conductance-performance association during the harder noisy task, but that is a physiological finding, not proof that noise caused worse performance.