Discrimination in Autism within Different Sensory Modalities

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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of autism and developmental disorders 2006-07, Vol.36 (5), p.665-675
Main Authors: O'Riordan, Michelle, Passetti, Filippo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Analysis of Variance
Auditory Discrimination
Auditory Perception
Auditory Stimuli
Autism
Autistic Disorder - psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child clinical studies
Children
Cognition
Cognitive Style
Comparative Analysis
Control Groups
Developmental disorders
Discrimination (Psychology)
Discrimination Learning
Hearing
Humans
Hypothesis Testing
Infantile autism
Investigations
Learning Modalities
Medical sciences
Performance Based Assessment
Physical Stimulation
Psychological Studies
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Reference Values
Stimuli
Tactual Perception
Touch
Visual Perception
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:0162-3257
1573-3432
DOI:10.1007/s10803-006-0106-1