Audiovisual temporal binding window narrows with age in autistic individuals.
Sensory timing gaps in autism shrink naturally with age, so wait or re-test before treating them as fixed problems.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ainsworth et al. (2023) watched how autistic and neurotypical kids put sights and sounds together.
They measured the 'temporal binding window'—the tiny time gap in which a beep and a flash still feel like one event.
Kids aged 8 to 18 did simple computer tasks while the researchers shifted the timing of sounds and images.
What they found
The older the autistic child, the narrower the window became.
By the teen years the gap between autistic and typical youth had almost closed.
This tells us sensory timing in autism is not fixed; it keeps improving through adolescence.
How this fits with other research
Taylor et al. (2010) saw the same catch-up trend earlier, so the new study adds a sharper ruler to that finding.
Zhou et al. (2020) looks like a contradiction—they found no age change in typical teens and adults.
The key difference: Kirsty studied autistic youth, whose timing skills keep maturing, while Han-Yu looked only at neurotypical people whose window had already plateaued.
Pulliam et al. (2025) link better audiovisual timing to stronger reading scores in both groups, showing the skill matters in the classroom.
Why it matters
If you test sensory timing in a ten-year-old with autism, the score may look poor. Wait three years and it could be near typical without any special training.
Use age-normed tools and re-check before adding programs that target 'deficits' that may resolve on their own.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Atypical sensory perception has been recognized in autistic individuals since its earliest descriptions and is now considered a key characteristic of autism. Although the integration of sensory information (multisensory integration; MSI) has been demonstrated to be altered in autism, less is known about how this perceptual process differs with age. This study aimed to assess the integration of audiovisual information across autistic children and adolescents. MSI was measured using a non-social, simultaneity judgment task. Variation in temporal sensitivity was evaluated via Gaussian curve fitting procedures, allowing us to compare the width of temporal binding windows (TBWs), where wider TBWs indicate less sensitivity to temporal alignment. We compared TBWs in age and IQ matched groups of autistic (n = 32) and neurotypical (NT; n = 73) children and adolescents. The sensory profile of all participants was also measured. Across all ages assessed (i.e., 6 through 18 years), TBWs were negatively correlated with age in the autistic group. A significant correlation was not found in the NT group. When compared as a function of child (6-12 years) and adolescent (13-18 years) age groups, a significant interaction of group (autism vs NT) by age group was found, whereby TBWs became narrower with age in the autistic, but not neurotypical group. We also found a significant main effect of age and no significant main effect of group. Results suggest that TBW differences between autistic and neurotypical groups diminishes with increasing age, indicating an atypical developmental profile of MSI in autism which ameliorates across development.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2860