AUTHOR=Stefanou Maria Elena , Dundon Neil M. , Bestelmeyer Patricia E. G. , Biscaldi Monica , Smyrnis Nikolaos , Klein Christoph 

TITLE=The dissociating effects of fear and disgust on multisensory integration in autism: evidence from evoked potentials

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 18 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2024.1390696

DOI=10.3389/fnins.2024.1390696

ISSN=1662-453X

ABSTRACT=Background. Deficits in Multisensory Integration (MSI) in ASD have been reported repeatedly and have been suggested to be caused by altered long-range connectivity. Here we investigate behavioural and ERP correlates of MSI in ASD using ecologically valid videos of emotional expressions. Methods. In the present study, we set out to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of audiovisual MSI in young autistic and neurotypical adolescents. We employed dynamic stimuli of high ecological validity (500 ms clips produced by actors) that depicted fear or disgust in unimodal (visual and auditory), and bimodal (audiovisual) conditions. Results. We report robust MSI effects at both the behavioural and electrophysiological levels and pronounced differences between autistic and neurotypical participants. Specifically, neurotypical controls showed robust behavioural MSI for both emotions as seen through a significant speed-up of bimodal response time (RT), confirmed by Miller's Race Model Inequality (RMI), with greater MSI effects for fear than disgust. Adolescents with ASD, by contrast, showed behavioural MSI only for fear. At the electrophysiological level, the bimodal condition as compared to the unimodal conditions reduced the amplitudes of the visual P100 and auditory P200 and increased the amplitude of the visual N170 regardless of group. Furthermore, a cluster-based analysis across all electrodes revealed that adolescents with ASD showed an overall delayed and spatially constrained MSI effect compared to controls. Conclusion. Given that the variables we measured reflect attention, our findings suggest that MSI can be modulated by the differential effects on attention that fear and disgust produce. We also argue that the MSI deficits seen in autistic individuals can be compensated for at later processing stages by a) the attentionorienting effects of fear, at the behavioural level, and b) at the electrophysiological level via increased attentional effort.