Reduced Sensory Habituation in Autism and Its Correlation with Behavioral Measures
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Reduced Sensory Habituation in Autism and Its Correlation with Behavioral Measures Wasifa Jamal1 · Annie Cardinaux1 · Amanda J. Haskins1,2 · Margaret Kjelgaard1,3,4 · Pawan Sinha1 Accepted: 3 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Autism is strongly associated with sensory processing difficulties. We investigate sensory habituation, given its relevance for understanding important phenotypic traits like hyper- and hypo-sensitivities. We collected electroencephalography data from 22 neuro-typical(NT) and 13 autistic(ASD) children during the presentation of visual and auditory sequences of repeated stimuli. Our data show that the ASD children have significantly reduced habituation relative to the NT children for both auditory and visual stimuli. These results point to impaired habituation as a modality-general phenomenon in ASD. Additionally, the rates of habituation are correlated with several clinical scores associated with competence along diverse phenotypic dimensions. These data suggest that the sensory difficulties in autism are likely to be associated with reduced habituation and are related to clinical symptomology. Keywords Sensory habituation · Autism · Hyper and hypo-sensitivity · Audition · Vision · Electroencephalography
Introduction Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social communication skills and repetitive behaviors (American Psychiatric Association 2013), estimated to affect over 1% of all children (Christensen et al. 2016). A key correlate of autism is unusual sensory perception. Observations of sensory differences date to the original reports by Kanner (1943). Over 90% of individuals with autism report sensory difficulties in several modalities (Leekam et al. 2007; Marco et al. 2011). The strong association with ASD of hyper- and hypo-sensitivity to sensory stimuli has led to the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013) now including them as diagnostic features of ASD. * Wasifa Jamal [email protected] 1
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
2
Present Address: Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
3
Present Address: Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA
4
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions, Boston, MA, USA
Despite the prevalence of sensory issues in autism, a mechanistic understanding of their causal basis has been elusive. One possibility is that autism affects basic sensory sensitivities, leading to a perceived enhancement or diminishment of normal intensity stimuli (Heaton et al. 1998; Gomot et al. 2002; Bonnel et al. 2003; Ferri et al. 2003; Khalfa et al. 2004; Ashwin et al. 2009). However, this account has been questioned by several follow-up studies that failed to find significant sensory acuity differences between NT and ASD participant groups in visual, auditory and somatosensory dom
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