Intact Audiovisual Spatial Integration in Autistic Children

In addition to the core domains of social communication impairments (SCI) and patterns of restricted and repetitive behaviors and interests (RRBIs), autism is characterized by changes in sensory processing, including in the integration of information across the different sensory modalities. While there is significant evidence that audiovisual (AV) integration is altered in the temporal domain in autism-and that these differences are associated with presentation of SCI and RRBIs-very little is known about how autistic individuals integrate AV information in the domain of space.

We conducted a free-response AV spatial localization task in autistic and non-autistic children aged 7-17 years to understand better AV localization abilities, as well as how these abilities relate to SCI, RRBIs, and other clinical features of autism.

While we found no group differences in AV spatial performance, an exploratory analysis revealed three clusters of autism features that were significantly predictive of performance across groups: a motor/somatosensory cluster, a sensory responsivity cluster, and a social communication cluster.

Although autistic children appear to have intact audiovisual spatial integration ability, we believe that specific autism features and their links to AV spatial integration need to be further explored in future research. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.