Differences in audiovisual temporal processing in autistic adults are specific to simultaneity judgments.
Autistic adults need larger gaps to spot audiovisual mistiming, but only on simultaneity tasks—use temporal order tasks instead.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Regener et al. (2024) asked autistic and neurotypical adults to judge audiovisual clips. Some clips showed a person talking. Others showed simple flashes and beeps. The task was to say if sound and picture happened 'together' or 'not together'.
The team also ran a second task. Here, adults picked which came first: sound or picture. This is called a temporal order judgment. It tests a different timing skill.
What they found
On 'together' judgments, autistic adults missed small mismatches more often. The gap had to be larger for them to notice. On 'which came first' judgments, both groups scored the same.
The drop showed up only with social clips, not with simple flashes. The trouble is task-specific, not across-the-board.
How this fits with other research
Bunce et al. (2024) seems to disagree. They found autistic adults judge changes in personal space as well as neurotypicals. Both studies used social cues, yet only Paula’s group found a deficit. The key difference is the skill tested: timing versus distance. Together, the papers show social perception problems are narrow, not global.
Gowen et al. (2022) adds a match. Their autistic adults also struggled with action timing when a hand movement paused. Both labs point to the same idea: autistic adults need larger time gaps to spot social mistiming.
Older work backs this up. Boets et al. (2015) showed teens with autism and language delay needed longer gaps to hear two sounds as separate. Dube et al. (1991) found slower brainstem responses in autistic children. The pattern holds across ages and methods: timing, not loudness or pitch, is the sticking point.
Why it matters
If you run social skills groups, swap 'Did the words and lips match?' tasks for 'Which came first?' drills. The second catches timing issues without the extra load of judging simultaneity. Also, give clients a wider window—pause an extra quarter-second before prompting a response. Small timing tweaks can keep multisensory training useful instead of frustrating.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Research has shown that children on the autism spectrum and adults with high levels of autistic traits are less sensitive to audiovisual asynchrony compared to their neurotypical peers. However, this evidence has been limited to simultaneity judgments (SJ) which require participants to consider the timing of two cues together. Given evidence of partly divergent perceptual and neural mechanisms involved in making temporal order judgments (TOJ) and SJ, and given that SJ require a more global type of processing which may be impaired in autistic individuals, here we ask whether the observed differences in audiovisual temporal processing are task and stimulus specific. We examined the ability to detect audiovisual asynchrony in a group of 26 autistic adult males and a group of age and IQ-matched neurotypical males. Participants were presented with beep-flash, point-light drumming, and face-voice displays with varying degrees of asynchrony and asked to make SJ and TOJ. The results indicated that autistic participants were less able to detect audiovisual asynchrony compared to the control group, but this effect was specific to SJ and more complex social stimuli (e.g., face-voice) with stronger semantic correspondence between the cues, requiring a more global type of processing. This indicates that audiovisual temporal processing is not generally different in autistic individuals and that a similar level of performance could be achieved by using a more local type of processing, thus informing multisensory integration theory as well as multisensory training aimed to aid perceptual abilities in this population.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3134