Children with Autism Have 'Out of Sync' Hearing and Seeing Functions

Children who are diagnosed with autism have been found to not have in sync hearing and visual functions, according to a recent study.

"There is a huge amount of effort and energy going into the treatment of children with autism, virtually none of it is based on a strong empirical foundation tied to sensory function," said lead study author Mark Wallace, director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute in the United States. "If we can fix this deficit in early sensory function they maybe we can see benefits in language and communication and social interactions," he added.

Researchers involved in the study used various types of audio visual stimuli such as simple flashes and beeps, more complex environmental stimuli like a hammer hitting a nail, and speech stimuli. They then asked the participants to inform them whether the visual and auditory events happened at the same time. They found that children with autism have an enlargement in something known as temporal blinding window (TBW) which means their brains have trouble associating visual and auditory events that happen within a certain period of time.

"Children with autism have difficulty processing simultaneous input from audio and visual channels. That is, they have trouble integrating simultaneous information from their eyes and their ears," said co-author Stephen Camarata, professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences. "It's like they are watching a foreign movie that was badly dubbed, the auditory and visual signals do not match in their brains." The study is published in the journal of Neuroscience.