Medical News: Autistic Children Slower to Integrate Multiple Stimuli - in Pediatrics, Autism from MedPage Today

Medical News: Autistic Children Slower to Integrate Multiple Stimuli - in Pediatrics, Autism from MedPage Today

Children with autism spectrum disorders are slower at integrating various types of sensory information than those with a more typical development, researchers reported.

The finding -- based on recordings of electrical activity in the brain -- is concrete evidence that children with autism spectrum disorders process information differently than typical children, according to Sophie Molholm, PhD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, and colleagues.

As well as occurring later, so-called "multi-sensory integration" was also less extensive than in typical children, Molholm and colleagues reported online in Autism Research.
Action Points
Explain to interested parents that children with autism spectrum disorders are slower and less effective at integrating various types of sensory information ("multi-sensory integration") than those with a more typical development.


Explain further that it is unclear how such changes in multi-sensory integration affect specific types of behaviors found in children with autism spectrum disorders.
The notion that difficulties with multi-sensory integration lie at the root of autism spectrum disorders has been popular for some time. "It's a new catch-all term," Molholm told MedPage Today.
But there has been little verification of the idea and what research has been done has had equivocal results, she said.

"There is basically absolutely no empirical data to support the idea or to guide how you would deal with it if it were a problem," Molholm said.

Despite that, there is a cottage industry on the Internet that offers to treat deficits in multi-sensory integration in children with autism spectrum disorders.

To help fill the information gap, she and colleagues measured electrical activity in the brains of 17 children ages six to 16 with autism spectrum disorders while they watched a silent movie and were given unrelated auditory and tactile sensations.

Seventeen typically developing children -- matched for age and intelligence quotient -- underwent the same testing, in which the auditory and tactile sensations were given separately and then together.

The researchers summed the responses to the single sensations, as measured by high-density electrophysiology, and compared them with responses to the combined stimuli.

The combined responses of all the children exceeded the sum of the single responses -- an indication of multi-sensory integration. But the autistic children had less pronounced differences, the researchers said, suggesting their integration was less effective.

As well, the multi-sensory integration took place within about 100 to 200 milliseconds of the stimuli in the typical children, the researchers found, but only occurred after about 300 milliseconds in the autistic children.

The finding doesn't mean the autistic children can't integrate different types of stimuli, but it does show that they do it differently, Molholm said. The research also says nothing about how such differences affect behavior.

"That's the ultimate quest, but we aren't there yet," she told MedPage Today. "This is straight brain measurement, which we don't yet correlate with behavior."

It's also a highly artificial experiment, she said, and she and colleagues are now trying to see what happens in more real-life situations.

For instance, it's known that typically, people hear speech better if they can see the lips of the person speaking. What's not known is if people with autism spectrum disorder get the "same boost in perception" from the multiple sensory inputs, she said.