Abstract
Individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) have problems in following conversation, especially in the situations where several people are talking. This might result from impairments in audiovisual speech perception, especially from difficulties in focusing attention to speech-relevant visual information and ignoring distracting information. We studied the effect of visual spatial attention on the audiovisual speech perception of adult individuals with AS and matched control participants. Two faces were presented side by side, one uttering /aka/ and the other /ata/, while an auditory stimulus of /apa/ was played. The participants fixated on a central cross and directed their attention to the face that an arrow pointed to, reporting which consonant they heard. We hypothesized that the adults with AS would be more distracted by a competing talking face than the controls. Instead, they were able to covertly attend to the talking face, and they were as distracted by a competing face as the controls. Independently of the attentional effect, there was a qualitative difference in audiovisual speech perception: when the visual articulation was /aka/, the control participants heard /aka/ almost exclusively, while the participants with AS heard frequently /ata/. This finding may relate to difficulties in face-to-face communication in AS.
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Notes
As in that study, it should be noted that the Asperger group was not homogenous. Some AS participants heard the ApVk stimulus as K in the same way as the control participants, while other AS participants heard more T. These individual differences are described in more detail in Saalasti et al. (2011).
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the participants of this study. We thank B.Sci Tapani Suihkonen for participating in the preparation of the experiment, MD Ph.D. Taina Nieminen-von Wendt for help with diagnostic expertise, professor Pirkko Oittinen for providing access to the eye tracking equipment and M.Sci Mari Laine-Hernandez for help with the equipment. PhD Minna Laakso and PhD Eira Jansson-Verkasalo gave useful comments as the supervisors of Satu Saalasti’s PhD thesis. This study was funded by Langnet, the Finnish Graduate School of Language Studies and the Jenny and Antti Wihuri foundation. We dedicate this study to the memory of professor Lennart von Wendt.
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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3029-4.
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Saalasti, S., Tiippana, K., Kätsyri, J. et al. The effect of visual spatial attention on audiovisual speech perception in adults with Asperger syndrome. Exp Brain Res 213, 283–290 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2751-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2751-7