Relations Between the McGurk Effect, Social and Communication Skill, and Autistic Features in Children with and without Autism.

Children with autism show alterations in multisensory integration that have been theoretically and empirically linked with the core and related features of autism. It is unclear, however, to what extent multisensory integration maps onto features of autism within children with and without autism. This study, thus, evaluates relations between audiovisual integration and core and related autism features across children with and without autism. Thirty-six children reported perceptions of the McGurk illusion during a psychophysical task. Parents reported on participants' autistic features. Increased report of illusory percepts tended to covary with reduced autistic features and greater communication skill. Some relations, though, were moderated by group. This work suggests that associations between multisensory integration and higher-order skills are present, but in some instances vary according to diagnostic group.

Rhythmic Modulation of Entrained Auditory Oscillations by Visual Inputs.

Temporal structure is ubiquitous in sensory signals, and the brain has been shown to robustly represent information about temporal structure in the phase of low frequency neural oscillations. In a related construct, the integration of information across the different senses has been proposed to be at least partly due to the phase resetting of these low frequency oscillations. As a consequence, oscillations represent a potential contributor to the encoding of complex multisensory signals with informative temporal structures. Here we investigated these interactions using electroencephalography (EEG). We entrained low frequency (3 Hz) delta oscillations using a repetitive auditory stimulus-broadband amplitude modulated noise. Following entrainment, we presented auditory and audiovisual stimuli at variable delays. We examined whether the power of oscillations at the entrained frequency was dependent on the delay (and thus, potentially, phase) at which subsequent stimulation was delivered, and whether this relationship was different for subsequent multisensory (i.e., audiovisual) stimuli when compared with auditory stimuli alone. Our findings demonstrate that, when the subsequent stimuli are solely auditory, the power of oscillations at the entrained frequency is rhythmically modulated by when the stimulus was delivered. For audiovisual stimuli, however, no such dependency is present, yielding consistent power modulations. These effects indicate that reciprocal oscillatory mechanisms may be involved in the continuous encoding of complex temporally structured multisensory inputs such as speech.