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Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Auditory cortical change detection in adults with Asperger syndrome
Tuulia Lepistö1, Taina Nieminen-von Wendt, Lennart von Wendt
1Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 9, University of Helsinki, and Department of Child Neurology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland. tuulia.lepisto@helsinki.fi
Abstract:
The present study investigated whether auditory deficits reported in children with Asperger syndrome (AS) are also present in adulthood. To this end, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults with AS for duration, pitch, and phonetic changes in vowels, and for acoustically matched non-speech stimuli. These subjects had enhanced mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitudes particularly for pitch and duration deviants, indicating enhanced sound-discrimination abilities. Furthermore, as reflected by the P3a, their involuntary orienting was enhanced for changes in non-speech sounds, but tended to be deficient for changes in speech sounds. The results are consistent with those reported earlier in children with AS, except for the duration-MMN, which was diminished in children and enhanced in adults.
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