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Discrimination in Autism Within Different Sensory Modalities

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Abstract

Recent studies have suggested that unusual visual processing in autism might stem from enhanced visual discrimination. Although there are also many anecdotal reports of auditory and tactile processing disturbances in autism these have received comparatively little attention. It is possible that the enhanced discrimination ability in vision in autism might extend to other modalities and further that they may underlie many reports of unusual touch and audition. The present study investigated the performance of children with and without autism on auditory and tactile discrimination tasks and revealed superior auditory but comparable tactile discrimination in autism relative to controls. These results extend previous findings of perceptual discrimination in autism and may be relevant for a neuro-developmental hypothesis of the disorder.

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Notes

  1. Hypersensitivity is defined here as apparent excessive or abnormal sensitivity and distress to sensory stimuli which is evident in the behavioural reactions of the individual.

  2. It is important to note that the three experiments presented here are not assessing absolute threshold in children with and without autism but rather group differences in the ability to discriminate between auditory and tactile stimuli.

  3. To highlight that a simple difference in low-level perception could have far reaching ramifications is not to negate the possibility that hyper-perceptual discrimination may itself result from a failure of development of some other process or related neural structure, either within or outside the perceptual processing system.

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Acknowledgments

During the period of this work, Michelle O’Riordan was supported by a Dorothy Hodgkin, Royal Society Fellowship and a Research Fellowship from St. John’s College, Cambridge. We are extremely grateful to Professor Brian Moore and his co-workers, particularly Geoff Moore, for providing the stimuli used in Experiment 1 and for useful discussion. We are also grateful to Simon Baron-Cohen and Greg Davis for useful discussion. The authors would also like to thank Kate Sheppard and Anna Shiel for collecting some of the data as part of a final year project, the parents and teachers for allowing us to visit the schools to conduct this research, and to the children for taking part.

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  1. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Michelle O’Riordan & Filippo Passetti

  2. Autism Research Centre, Department of Developmental Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Douglas House, 18b Trumpington Road, Cambridge, CB2 2AH, UK

    Michelle O’Riordan

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  1. Michelle O’Riordan
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  2. Filippo Passetti
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Correspondence to Michelle O’Riordan.

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O’Riordan, M., Passetti, F. Discrimination in Autism Within Different Sensory Modalities. J Autism Dev Disord 36, 665–675 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0106-1

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