Data from three experiments on auditory attention and distraction in autistic and nonautistic adults

In this article, we describe a combined dataset from three experiments on auditory attention and distraction in young adult individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and nonautisitic individuals. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effects of steady-state, changing-state, and auditory deviant sounds on visual-verbal serial recall with list length adjusted individually to each participant. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effects of low- and high-intensity single-channel, dual-channel, and multi-channel speech on visual-verbal serial recall with a fixed list length of eight to-be-remembered items. Both serial position and cross-trial performance data are available for Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 3, we used a selective listening task with a to-be-attended relevant channel and a to-be-ignored irrelevant channel in which the own name and that of a yoked-control partner were embedded. The dataset also contains information on intellectual and language abilities (IST screening scores) and self-report autistic traits (AQ-10). The autistic group was recruited from the same participant pool, so that for many individuals, data from more than one experiment are available that can be compared with each other.