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The development of audiovisual multisensory integration across childhood and early adolescence: a high-density electrical mapping study.

ABSTRACT: The integration of multisensory information is essential to forming meaningful representations of the environment. Adults benefit from related multisensory stimuli but the extent to which the ability to optimally integrate multisensory inputs for functional purposes is present in children has not been extensively examined. Using a cross-sectional approach, high-density electrical mapping of event-related potentials (ERPs) was combined with behavioral measures to characterize neurodevelopmental changes in basic audiovisual (AV) integration from middle childhood through early adulthood. The data indicated a gradual fine-tuning of multisensory facilitation of performance on an AV simple reaction time task (as indexed by race model violation), which reaches mature levels by about 14 years of age. They also revealed a systematic relationship between age and the brain processes underlying multisensory integration (MSI) in the time frame of the auditory N1 ERP component (? 120 ms). A significant positive correlation between behavioral and neurophysiological measures of MSI suggested that the underlying brain processes contributed to the fine-tuning of multisensory facilitation of behavior that was observed over middle childhood. These findings are consistent with protracted plasticity in a dynamic system and provide a starting point from which future studies can begin to examine the developmental course of multisensory processing in clinical populations.

SUBMITTER: Brandwein AB

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3077428 | biostudies-literature | 2011 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The development of audiovisual multisensory integration across childhood and early adolescence: a high-density electrical mapping study.

Brandwein Alice B AB Foxe John J JJ Russo Natalie N NN Altschuler Ted S TS Gomes Hilary H Molholm Sophie S

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) 20100916 5

The integration of multisensory information is essential to forming meaningful representations of the environment. Adults benefit from related multisensory stimuli but the extent to which the ability to optimally integrate multisensory inputs for functional purposes is present in children has not been extensively examined. Using a cross-sectional approach, high-density electrical mapping of event-related potentials (ERPs) was combined with behavioral measures to characterize neurodevelopmental c ...[more]

PMID: 20847153

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Project description:An ever-growing literature has aimed to determine how individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) differ from their typically developing (TD) peers on measures of multisensory integration (MSI) and to ascertain the degree to which differences in MSI are associated with the broad range of symptoms associated with ASD. Findings, however, have been highly variable across the studies carried out to date. The present work systematically reviews and quantitatively synthesizes the large literature on audiovisual MSI in individuals with ASD to evaluate the cumulative evidence for (a) group differences between individuals with ASD and TD peers, (b) correlations between MSI and autism symptoms in individuals with ASD and (c) study level factors that may moderate findings (i.e., explain differential effects) observed across studies. To identify eligible studies, a comprehensive search strategy was employed using the ProQuest search engine, PubMed database, forwards and backwards citation searches, direct author contact, and hand-searching of select conference proceedings. A significant between-group difference in MSI was evident in the literature, with individuals with ASD demonstrating worse audiovisual integration on average across studies compared to TD controls. This effect was moderated by mean participant age, such that between-group differences were more pronounced in younger samples. The mean correlation between MSI and autism and related symptomatology was also significant, indicating that increased audiovisual integration in individuals with ASD is associated with better language/communication abilities and/or reduced autism symptom severity in the extant literature. This effect was moderated by whether the stimuli were linguistic versus non-linguistic in nature, such that correlation magnitudes tended to be significantly greater when linguistic stimuli were utilized in the measure of MSI. Limitations and future directions for primary and meta-analytic research are discussed.

Project description:Background: There exists a cohort of children and adults who exhibit an inordinately high degree of discomfort when experiencing what would be considered moderate and manageable levels of sensory input. That is, they show over-responsivity in the face of entirely typical sound, light, touch, taste, or smell inputs, and this occurs to such an extent that it interferes with their daily functioning and reaches clinical levels of dysfunction. What marks these individuals apart is that this sensory processing disorder (SPD) is observed in the absence of other symptom clusters that would result in a diagnosis of Autism, ADHD, or other neurodevelopmental disorders more typically associated with sensory processing difficulties. One major theory forwarded to account for these SPDs posits a deficit in multisensory integration, such that the various sensory inputs are not appropriately integrated into the central nervous system, leading to an overwhelming sensory-perceptual environment, and in turn to the sensory-defensive phenotype observed in these individuals. Methods: We tested whether children (6-16 years) with an over-responsive SPD phenotype (N = 12) integrated multisensory speech differently from age-matched typically-developing controls (TD: N = 12). Participants identified monosyllabic words while background noise level and sensory modality (auditory-alone, visual-alone, audiovisual) were varied in pseudorandom order. Improved word identification when speech was both seen and heard compared to when it was simply heard served to index multisensory speech integration. Results: School-aged children with an SPD show a deficit in the ability to benefit from the combination of both seen and heard speech inputs under noisy environmental conditions, suggesting that these children do not benefit from multisensory integrative processing to the same extent as their typically developing peers. In contrast, auditory-alone performance did not differ between the groups, signifying that this multisensory deficit is not simply due to impaired processing of auditory speech. Conclusions: Children with an over-responsive SPD show a substantial reduction in their ability to benefit from complementary audiovisual speech, to enhance speech perception in a noisy environment. This has clear implications for performance in the classroom and other learning environments. Impaired multisensory integration may contribute to sensory over-reactivity that is the definitional of SPD.

Dataset Information

The development of audiovisual multisensory integration across childhood and early adolescence: a high-density electrical mapping study.

Publications

The development of audiovisual multisensory integration across childhood and early adolescence: a high-density electrical mapping study.

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