Multisensory Integration and Temporal Synchrony in Autism

描述(由申请人提供)：自闭症患者经常表现出难以将来自多个来源的信息整合到对他们周围世界的连贯表示中。这种知觉缺陷可能在早期发育过程中尤其有害，因为人们在语言和交流中学到的很多东西都涉及到从其他人的言语和行为中整合听觉和视觉信息。在典型个体中，多感觉整合的一个关键方面是感知和利用时间同步线索来定位和识别多感觉对象的能力。虽然以前的工作强烈表明，自闭症患者的时间同步检测会发生变化，但这种缺陷对多感觉整合的影响仍有待研究。本研究将通过测量时间同步检测在多感官言语和非社会对象的定位、识别和神经加工中的贡献，来探讨自闭症儿童和配对对照儿童的时间同步检测与多感觉整合的关系。本地化和识别将用整合时间窗范式来衡量，这涉及改变听觉和视觉显示的同步性，并测试参与者是否能够利用异步显示来增强感知。时间同步性的神经加工将通过测量事件相关电位(ERP)的变化来研究，事件相关电位是神经活动在时间上最敏感的衡量指标之一，在异步的微小变化中。该项目将检验一种假设，即与对照组相比，自闭症患者在基本的多感觉整合任务中对时间不同步不那么敏感，而且这种群体差异在言语和非社会(即物体)刺激下都会明显。该项目将进一步测试在ERP任务期间非典型时间同步检测的这一假设。ERP方法提供的时间分辨率以及ERP范式的注意力要求降低(即，失配负性)，将提供自闭症患者在时间处理过程中基本神经缺陷的最敏感测试。这项拟议的研究将检验一般假设，即自闭症患者由于处理时间线索的缺陷，在整合视觉和听觉信息方面存在问题。这项对时间加工缺陷性质的研究将为自闭症患者沟通障碍的病因提供线索，并将表明时间加工和多感觉整合在多大程度上应该成为早期干预计划的重点。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Individuals with autism frequently show difficulty integrating information from multiple sources into coherent representations of the world around them. This perceptual deficit may be especially harmful during early development, when much of what is learned about language and communication involves integration of auditory and visual information from other humans' speech and behaviors. A crucial aspect of multisensory integration in typical individuals is the ability to perceive and utilize temporal synchrony cues to locate and identify multisensory objects. While previous work strongly suggests that temporal synchrony detection is altered in individuals with autism, the impact of such a deficit on multisensory integration remains to be studied. This Study will investigate the relationship between temporal synchrony detection and multisensory integration in children with autism and well-matched controls by measuring the contribution of temporal synchrony detection to the localization, identification, and neural processing of multisensory speech and non-social objects. Localization and identification will be measured with a time-window-of-integration paradigm, which involves altering the synchrony of auditory and visual displays and testing whether participants are able to utilize the asynchronous display to enhance perception. Neural processing of temporal synchrony will be investigated by measuring changes in event related potentials (ERP), one of the most temporally sensitive measures of neural activity, during small changes in asynchrony. This project will test the hypothesis that individuals with autism are less sensitive to temporal asynchrony in basic multisensory integration tasks compared to controls, and that this group difference will be evident with both speech and nonsocial (i.e., object) stimuli. This project will further test this hypothesis of atypical temporal synchrony detection during an ERP task. The temporal resolution afforded by ERP methods as well as the decreased attentional requirements of the ERP paradigm (i.e.. Mismatch Negativity), will provide the most sensitive test of basic neural deficits in temporal processing in autism. The proposed studies will test the general hypothesis that individuals with autism show problems integrating visual and auditory information due to deficits in processing temporal cues. This investigation of the nature of temporal processing deficits will provide clues to the etiology of communication deficits in autism, and will indicate the degree to which temporal processing and multisensory integration ought to be foci of early intervention programs.