Occelli, V. 1 , Esposito, G. 1, 2 , Venuti, P. . 1 , Arduino, G. M. 1, 3 & Zampini, M. 1, 4
1 Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education, University of Trento, Rovereto (TN), Italy
2 Kuroda Research Unit, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan
3 Centre for Autism and Asperger Syndrome, ASL1 CN1, Mondovì, Italy
4 Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto (TN), Italy
Previous evidence on adults shows that the presentation of a stimulus allocates the attention to its modality, resulting in faster responses to a subsequent target presented in the same (vs. different) modality. In this study, we compared the performance of a group of patients with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs; high-functioning; N=14; age: 12-16 yrs) and a group of neurotypical controls (N=17; 11-17 yrs). Participants were asked to detect a target (S2), auditory or visual, which was preceded, at different SOAs (i.e., 150, 600, 1,000 msec), by an uninformative cue (S1), either in the same or a different modality. Besides a generalized slowing down of the responses in the ASD patients (vs. controls), systematic differences between the two groups emerged. In controls, regardless of SOA, when S2 was visual, S1 modality did not affect performance. Unlikely, when S2 was auditory, and SOA was long, a visual S1 produced longer RTs as compared to when it was auditory. In the ASD group, an a-specific speeding up of responses was observed when S1 was auditory (vs. visual), with no effects on the detection of S2. The discrepancy of performance suggests that ASDs affect the processing of sensory inputs and the attentional crossmodal shift.