Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Brief Report: Cross-Modal Capture: Preliminary Evidence of Inefficient Filtering in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

  • Brief Report
  • Published:
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This study investigates how task-irrelevant auditory information is processed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eighteen children with ASD and 19 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children were presented with semantically-congruent and incongruent picture-sound pairs, and in separate tasks were instructed to attend to only visual or both audio-visual sensory channels. Preliminary results showed that when required to attend to both modalities, both groups were equally slowed for semantically-incongruent compared to congruent pairs. However, when asked to attend to only visual information, children with ASD were disproportionally slowed by incongruent auditory information, suggesting that they may have more difficulty filtering task-irrelevant cross-modal information. Correlational analyses showed that this inefficient cross-modal attentional filtering was related to greater sociocommunicative impairment.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

References

  • Adams, N. C., & Jarrold, C. (2012). Inhibition in autism: Children with autism have difficulty inhibiting irrelevant distractors but not prepotent responses. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(6), 1052–1063.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Beker, S., Foxe, J. J., & Molholm, S. (2018). Ripe for solution: Delayed development of multisensory processing in autism and its remediation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 84, 182–192.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Belmonte, M. K. (2017). Obligatory processing of task-irrelevant stimuli: A hallmark of autistic cognitive style within and beyond the diagnosis. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 2(6), 461–463.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burack, J. A. (1994). Selective attention deficits in persons with autism: Preliminary evidence of an inefficient attentional lens. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 103(3), 535–543.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ciesielski, K. T., Courchesne, E., & Elmasian, R. (1990). Effects of focused selective attention tasks on event-related potentials in autistic and normal individuals. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 75(3), 207–220.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Eriksen, B. A., & Eriksen, C. W. (1974). Effects of noise letter upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task. Perception and Psychophysics, 16, 143–149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Faja, S., Clarkson, T., & Webb, S. J. (2016). Neural and behavioral suppression of interfering flankers by children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Neuropsychologia, 93(Pt A), 251–261.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Hill, E. L. (2004). Evaluating the theory of executive dysfunction in autism. Developmental Review, 24, 189–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Keehn, B., Nair, A., Lincoln, A. J., Townsend, J., & Muller, R. A. (2016). Under-reactive but easily distracted: An fMRI investigation of attentional capture in autism spectrum disorder. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 46–56.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Larson, M. J., South, M., Clayson, P. E., & Clawson, A. (2012). Cognitive control and conflict adaptation in youth with high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 53(4), 440–448.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lord, C., Rutter, M., DiLavore, P. C., & Risi, S. (1999). Autism diagnostic obervation schedule—WPS (ADOS-WPS). Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCleery, J. P., Ceponiene, R., Burner, K. M., Townsend, J., Kinnear, M., & Schreibman, L. (2010). Neural correlates of verbal and nonverbal semantic integration in children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(3), 277–286.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Murphy, J. W., Foxe, J. J., Peters, J. B., & Molholm, S. (2014). Susceptibility to distraction in autism spectrum disorder: Probing the integrity of oscillatory alpha-band suppression mechanisms. Autism Research, 7(4), 442–458.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Remington, A., Swettenham, J., Campbell, R., & Coleman, M. (2009). Selective attention and perceptual load in autism spectrum disorder. Psychological Science, 20, 1388–1393

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rutter, M., Le Couteur, A., & Lord, C. (2003). Autism diagnostic interview—revised. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.

    Google Scholar 

  • Teder-Salejarvi, W. A., Pierce, K. L., Courchesne, E., & Hillyard, S. A. (2005). Auditory spatial localization and attention deficits in autistic adults. Cognitive Brain Research, 23(2–3), 221–234.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Tillmann, J., Olguin, A., Tuomainen, J., & Swettenham, J. (2015). The effect of visual perceptual load on auditory awareness in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 45(10), 3297–3307.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Tillmann, J., & Swettenham, J. (2017). Visual perceptual load reduces auditory detection in typically developing individuals but not in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Neuropsychology, 31(2), 181–190.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Toichi, M., & Kamio, Y. (2001). Verbal association for simple common words in high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31(5), 483–490.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wechsler, D. (1999). Wechsler’s abbreviated scale of intelligence. San Antonio: The Psychological Corporation.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by R01-NS42639 (JT). Special thanks to the children and families who generously participated.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, 715 Clinic Drive, Lyles-Porter Hall, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Brandon Keehn

  2. Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Brandon Keehn

  3. Research on Autism and Development Lab, Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

    Marissa Westerfield & Jeanne Townsend

Authors
  1. Brandon Keehn
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Marissa Westerfield
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Jeanne Townsend
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

All authors made substantial contributions to the conception and design of the study. BK acquired the data, performed the statistical analyses, and drafted the manuscript. JT helped interpret the data and revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Brandon Keehn.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

All authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed assent and consent were obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Keehn, B., Westerfield, M. & Townsend, J. Brief Report: Cross-Modal Capture: Preliminary Evidence of Inefficient Filtering in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 49, 385–390 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3674-y

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3674-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation