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Auditory Attentional Disengagement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

Despite early differences in orienting to sounds, no study to date has investigated whether children with ASD demonstrate impairments in attentional disengagement in the auditory modality. Twenty-one 9–15-year-old children with ASD and 20 age- and IQ-matched TD children were presented with an auditory gap–overlap paradigm. Evidence of impaired disengagement in ASD was mixed. Differences in saccadic reaction time for overlap and gap conditions did not differ between groups. However, children with ASD did show increased no-shift trials in the overlap condition, as well as reduced disengagement efficiency compared to their TD peers. These results provide further support for disengagement impairments in ASD, and suggest that these deficits include disengaging from and shifting to unimodal auditory information.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, 715 Clinic Drive, Lyles-Porter Hall, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Brandon Keehn, Girija Kadlaskar & Alexander L. Francis

  2. Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Brandon Keehn

  3. Department of Pediatrics, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA

    Rebecca McNally Keehn

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  1. Brandon Keehn
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BK conceived of and designed the study. ALF participated in the design of the study. BK, GK, and RMK acquired the data. BK performed the statistical analyses and drafted the manuscript. GK, RMK, and ALF helped revise the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Brandon Keehn.

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Keehn, B., Kadlaskar, G., McNally Keehn, R. et al. Auditory Attentional Disengagement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 49, 3999–4008 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-04111-z

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