An Intervention Study Of Audiovisual Integration Based On Divided Attention In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Multisensory integration refers to the process of integrating information from multiple interacting sensory channels into a unified,coherent,and stable perception.Individuals with autism have multisensory integration deficits,difficulty integrating information from multiple sensory channels to obtain a unified percept,and deficits such as a wider temporal binding window and insufficient ability to rapid audiovisual temporal recalibration than typically development individuals.Multisensory integration deficits in children with autism may have a significant impact on their atypical social behaviors,leading to difficulties in the development of advanced skills such as language and social skills,as well as difficulties in understanding others’ intentions in social situations.Current research has focused on audiovisual integration.Recent studies have found that attention modulates the process of audiovisual integration and is an important factor affecting audiovisual integration.Depending on the sensory channels to which attention is directed,attention can be divided into selective attention(attention to information from a single sensory channel)and divided attention(attention to information from two or more sensory channels simultaneously).Therefore,the present study mainly investigated the effects of different attention conditions on audiovisual integration in children with autism and their differences from typically development children,and based on this,we selected the attentional conditions that were more conducive to the audiovisual integration of children with autism and trained them with computerized audiovisual feedback under different stimuli to improve their audiovisual integration ability.Specifically,Study 1 investigated whether children with autism could produce audiovisual integration in these two attentional conditions and how they differed from typically development children through a simple reaction time task,and provided the basis for Study 2,which focused on audiovisual integration in children with autism.It was found that children with autism were capable of integrating audiovisual congruent stimuli in the divided attention condition,but this integration had a wide temporal binding window and a delay in audiovisual integration;they failed to produce integration of audiovisual congruent stimuli in the selective attention condition.In contrast,typically development children were able to integrate audiovisual congruent stimuli in both sets of attention conditions.In addition,children in both groups failed to integrate audiovisual incongruent stimuli in both attention conditions.Next,Study 2 proposes to conduct Intervention 1,which uses geometric figures,a non-social stimulus of interest to children with autism,and conducts computerized audiovisual feedback training under the divided attention condition that is more conducive to audiovisual integration in children with autism,along with some supplementary instruction to improve audiovisual integration in children with autism.The computerized audiovisual feedback training was conducted under the divided attention condition of Study 1,which was more conducive to autistic children’s audiovisual integration.Intervention 2 used a progression of social stimuli from cartoon faces,character sketches to real faces to improve the ecological validity of the training,and the sounds were selected from The Montreal Affective Voices for the attention-based computerized audiovisual feedback training,so that children with autism could better integrate emotional faces.Children with autism were able to better integrate emotional face-voice stimuli,improve their avoidance of social stimuli such as faces,and alleviate their social deficits.The results of Study 2 found that both autism-trained children and untrained autism control children were unable to integrate audiovisual or audiovisual incongruent stimuli during the pretest phase.However,children in the autism-trained group were trained to produce audiovisual integration of the audiovisual congruent stimuli at the posttest stage,whereas children in the untrained autism control group were still unable to produce integration of the audiovisual congruent stimuli,and neither group was able to produce integration of the audiovisual incongruent stimuli at the posttest stage.Overall,the study shows that attention modulates audiovisual integration in children with autism and that children with autism are able to produce audiovisual integration under divided attention conditions.Moreover,the multisensory integration of children with autism is plastic,and computerized audiovisual feedback training can improve their audiovisual integration.