Auditory Attentional Disengagement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Despite early differences in orienting to sounds, no study to date has investigated whether children with ASD demonstrate impairments in attentional disengagement in the auditory modality. Twenty-one 9-15-year-old children with ASD and 20 age- and IQ-matched TD children were presented with an auditory gap-overlap paradigm. Evidence of impaired disengagement in ASD was mixed. Differences in saccadic reaction time for overlap and gap conditions did not differ between groups. However, children with ASD did show increased no-shift trials in the overlap condition, as well as reduced disengagement efficiency compared to their TD peers. These results provide further support for disengagement impairments in ASD, and suggest that these deficits include disengaging from and shifting to unimodal auditory information.