New research suggests autistic children see the world as "a movie that was badly dubbed'.
The researchers believe children struggling with autism "have trouble integrating simultaneous information from their eyes and their ears," a Vanderbilt University Medical Center news release reported.
The team found a link between problems with autistic children's "sensory building blocks" and societal skills.
"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," Mark Wallace, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute said in the news release. "If we can fix this deficit in early sensory function then maybe we can see benefits in language and communication and social interactions."
The team believes sensory function was also altered in cases of dyslexia and schizophrenia.
The researchers looked at 32 typically-developing children between the ages of six and 18 and 32 high-functioning autistic children in the same age range. The team found the autistic and non-autistic children were "virtually matched," including in IQ.
The team made their findings using audiovisual stimuli (like beeps and flashes), environmental stimuli (such as a "hammer hitting a nail") and speech stimuli. The team then asked the participants to determine if the auditory and visual stimuli had occurred at the same time.
They found the children with autism had an enlargement in their temporal binding window (TBW), which causes the brain to have trouble processing visual and auditory events within a certain timeframe.
"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," co-author Stephen Camarata, Ph.D., professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences, said. "It is like they are watching a foreign movie that was badly dubbed, the auditory and visual signals do not match in their brains."
The researcher also found autistic children showed weaknesses in how strongly they were able to associate audiovisual speech stimuli.
"One of the classic pictures of children with autism is they have their hands over their ears," Wallace said. "We believe that one reason for this may be that they are trying to compensate for their changes in sensory function by simply looking at one sense at a time. This may be a strategy to minimize the confusion between the senses."
