ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL MEASURES OF TACTILE AND AUDITORY PROCESSING IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

Girija Suhas Kadlaskar
2020
Touch plays a key role in facilitating social communication and is often presented in conjunction with auditory stimuli such as speech. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently show atypical behavioral responsivity to both tactile and auditory stimuli, which is associated with increased ASD symptomatology. However, as discussed throughout Chapter 1, the neural mechanisms associated with responsivity to tactile and auditory stimuli in ASD are not fully understood. For example,
more » ... ome have argued that differences in responding to tactile and auditory stimuli may be attributed to sensory and perceptual factors, whereas others suggest that these differences could be related to atypicalities in allocation of attention to incoming stimuli. In Chapter 2, I address these competing hypotheses by examining early and late ERP components (indicative of perceptual and attentional processing respectively) in response to tactile and auditory stimuli. Next, despite the evidence suggesting that touch plays a role in modulating attention in typical development (TD), it is unclear whether touch cues affect the response of the phasic alerting network – a subcomponent of attention – in ASD and TD, and whether the alerting response may be atypical in children with ASD. In Chapter 3, I address this gap in the literature by examining whether tactile cues presented at different intervals before auditory targets facilitate reaction times differently in children with ASD and TD. Lastly, because prior research has shown associations between sensory and attentional processes and ASD symptomatology, in Chapters 2 and 3, I examine the associations of neural and behavioral indices of tactile and auditory processing with ASD symptomatology and language skills in children with ASD and TD. In Chapter 2, I show that children in both the ASD and TD groups do not exhibit differences in both early and later neurological responses to tactile and auditory stimuli, suggesting that under certain experimentally-controlled conditions, behavi [...]
doi:10.25394/pgs.12703067.v1 fatcat:za6uogmvordcfgubmlkcugt52y