Impairments in multisensory processing are not universal to the autism spectrum: no evidence for crossmodal priming deficits in Asperger syndrome.
Crossmodal priming with nonsocial stimuli is intact in adults with Asperger syndrome, so don’t assume universal multisensory deficits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
David et al. (2011) tested crossmodal priming in adults with Asperger syndrome.
They used simple sounds and pictures that were not social.
The team asked: do these adults link sight and sound as fast as typical adults?
What they found
The Asperger group showed the same priming boost as controls.
There was no lag in joining a sound to a later picture.
The authors say a broad multisensory deficit is not true for this group.
How this fits with other research
Charbonneau et al. (2020) saw weaker visual-tactile integration in autistic adults.
The tasks differ: Nicole used nonsocial sound-to-picture primes; Geneviève used touch and vision together.
Regener et al. (2024) also found timing trouble, but only with social clips and a harder simultaneity task.
Nicole’s null result stays clean because the stimuli were simple and sequential.
Adams et al. (2024) add brain data: autistic adults show slower auditory brain waves even when behavior looks normal.
The priming can look fine while EEG still flags a neural gap.
Why it matters
Do not assume every client with Asperger or ASD will struggle to pair sights and sounds.
If you use nonsocial cues in instruction or AAC, the link may work fine.
Still watch for subtle timing issues in social or touch tasks; those may need extra support.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals suffering from autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often show a tendency for detail- or feature-based perception (also referred to as "local processing bias") instead of more holistic stimulus processing typical for unaffected people. This local processing bias has been demonstrated for the visual and auditory domains and there is evidence that multisensory processing may also be affected in ASD. Most multisensory processing paradigms used social-communicative stimuli, such as human speech or faces, probing the processing of simultaneously occuring sensory signals. Multisensory processing, however, is not limited to simultaneous stimulation. In this study, we investigated whether multisensory processing deficits in ASD persist when semantically complex but nonsocial stimuli are presented in succession. Fifteen adult individuals with Asperger syndrome and 15 control persons participated in a visual-audio priming task, which required the classification of sounds that were either primed by semantically congruent or incongruent preceding pictures of objects. As expected, performance on congruent trials was faster and more accurate compared with incongruent trials (crossmodal priming effect). The Asperger group, however, did not differ significantly from the control group. Our results do not support a general multisensory processing deficit, which is universal to the entire autism spectrum.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2011 · doi:10.1002/aur.210