A multilevel investigation of sensory sensitivity and responsivity in autistic adults.
Sensory sensitivity in autistic adults changes with how you measure it—ask, watch, and record before you treat.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sapey-Triomphe et al. (2023) asked autistic and neurotypical adults to look at striped patterns on a screen.
They measured how small the stripes could be before each person could no longer see them.
The team also gave everyone a questionnaire about daily sensory issues like bright lights or loud sounds.
Finally they recorded brain waves to see if the brain detected the stripes any differently.
What they found
Autistic adults said they were more bothered by lights, sounds, and textures.
On the stripe task they needed bigger stripes to spot them, so their visual threshold was shifted.
Yet their brain waves looked the same as neurotypical brains when the stripes appeared.
In short: self-report and behavior did not match the neural signal.
How this fits with other research
Cascio et al. (2008) saw a similar split for touch: autistic adults felt normal light pressure but reported more pain from vibration.
Crane et al. (2009) surveyed a large group and found almost every autistic adult scores extreme on at least one sensory quadrant, backing the idea that profiles are personal, not universal.
Menezes et al. (2025) add a twist: among autistic adults, under-reacting to sensory input—not over-reacting—best predicts trouble with planning and memory.
Together these papers warn that “hypersensitive” is too simple; some modalities are heightened, some blunted, and the picture changes with age, sex, and task.
Why it matters
For your next adult autism case, skip the blanket “avoid fluorescent lights” rule. Run a quick sensory interview, then test the exact visual, tactile, or auditory trigger in session. If the client says sirens hurt but the brain response looks flat, target coping skills for pain reports instead of sound reduction. Individual data beats assumptions every time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Atypical sensory processing is a core symptom of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We aimed at better characterizing visual sensitivity and responsivity in ASD at the self-reported, behavioral and neural levels, and at describing the relationships between these levels. We refer to sensory sensitivity as the ability to detect sensory stimuli and to sensory responsivity as an affective response to sensory stimuli. Participants were 25 neurotypical and 24 autistic adults. At the self-reported level, autistic participants had higher scores of sensory sensitivity and responsivity than neurotypicals. The behavioral and neural tasks involved contrast-reversing gratings which became progressively (in)visible as their contrast or spatial frequency evolved. At the behavioral level, autistic participants had higher detection and responsivity thresholds when gratings varied in spatial frequency, but their thresholds did not differ from neurotypicals when gratings varied in contrast. At the neural level, we used fast periodic visual stimulations and electroencephalography to implicitly assess detection thresholds for contrast and spatial frequency, and did not reveal any group difference. Higher self-reported responsivity was associated with higher behavioral responsivity, more intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety, in particular in ASD. At the self-reported level, higher sensitivity was associated with more responsivity in both groups, contrary to the behavioral level where these relationships were not found. These heterogeneous results suggest that sensitivity and responsivity per se are not simply increased in ASD, but may be modulated by other factors such as environmental predictability. Multi-level approaches can shed light on the mechanisms underlying sensory issues in ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2962