What affects development in autistic spectrum disorder?
What is the relationship between the development of children with autistic spectrum disorder and their multisensory information processing?
Humans are creatures that develop from when they are born until they die, and the foundation for this development is how well they can incorporate external information.
The brain is stimulated by various information, such as what the person sees, hears, and touches, and in many cases, our perception is made up of compound sources.
Similar to the way it feels different to listen to music with images rather than just music, or to eat food that has been put on a plate haphazardly rather than food that has been arranged nearly and beautifully, our brain has a mechanism to integrate and feel information of different types (in this case, sight and sound or sight and taste).
Thanks to this mechanism, newborn infants can learn language by integrating compound information such as the mother’s expressions, tone of voice and line of sight, and they also acquire the ability to read another’s mind and their intentions.
People with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) often have delayed language development and difficulty in communication. One theory holds that ASD is associated with problems in integrating information of different types, resulting in slower development of abilities such as language and sociality.
The paper I discuss today measured the brain waves of high-functioning ASD children and children with typical development when they performed a task to measure their capacity to integrate visual information and auditory information.
The topographic chart obtained from the brain waves in the results showed that the integration of audiovisual information was less complete in the high-functioning ASD children the younger they were, and this trend was apparent as a difference in the very initial stages (100 milliseconds) after they were shown the information. The results suggested that information was processed at this time by a different mechanism to normal development.
I think that being able to concentrate on one piece of information is one of the strengths of ASD, but the difficulty in combining several pieces of information might be a bottleneck in acquiring basic abilities.
[Abstract]
Successful integration of auditory and visual inputs is crucial for both basic perceptual functions and for higher-order processes related to social cognition. Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by impairments in social cognition and are associated with abnormalities in sensory and perceptual processes. Several groups have reported that individuals with ASD are impaired in their ability to integrate socially relevant audiovisual (AV) information, and it has been suggested that this contributes to the higher-order social and cognitive deficits observed in ASD. However, successful integration of auditory and visual inputs also influences detection and perception of nonsocial stimuli, and integration deficits may impair earlier stages of information processing, with cascading downstream effects. To assess the integrity of basic AV integration, we recorded high-density electrophysiology from a cohort of high-functioning children with ASD (7–16 years) while they performed a simple AV reaction time task. Children with ASD showed considerably less behavioral facilitation to multisensory inputs, deficits that were paralleled by less effective neural integration. Evidence for processing differences relative to typically developing children was seen as early as 100 ms poststimulation, and topographic analysis suggested that children with ASD relied on different cortical networks during this early multisensory processing stage.
