Empirical Article Critical Analysis - Short

Noel, J., Stevenson, R. and Wallace, M. (2018). Atypical audiovisual temporal function in autism and schizophrenia: similar phenotype, different cause. European Journal of Neuroscience, 47(10), pp.1230-1241.

As stimuli for different modalities have different travel and neural transmission times, a temporal binding window allows for the discrepancies between these travel times. With previous research indicating that individuals with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have significantly different temporal binding windows to their neurotypical counterparts, Noel, Stevenson and Wallace (2018) set out to investigate how temporal perception differs in ASD and Schizophrenic (SZ) individuals compared to neurotypical individuals. They hypothesized that ASD and SZ individuals would have an increased tendency to integrate sensory information from different modalities that would be demonstrated by an increased perception that the stimuli came from a common source. The researchers matched ASD and SZ individuals to neurotypical individuals by age and IQ and presented all participants with audiovisual stimuli of speakers saying ‘ga’ and ‘ba’ at different SOAs, with participants performing a simultaneity judgment (SJ) task. The results of the study showed that individuals with ASD and SZ have significantly longer temporal binding windows than their typically developing counterparts. The researchers also used bayesian causal inference modelling, with the results showing that individuals with ASD had significantly different causal inference model parameters than TD individuals. The results indicated that differences in multisensory temporal perception seem largely driven by differences in the likelihood to ascribe a common cause in ASD individual, however it does not seem to be driven by a single cause in SZ individuals.

A key limitation of this study is that the participants were not age matched to this study is that ASD and SZ individuals were not age matched to each other, with the participants in the ASD group being significantly younger than the participants in the SZ groups. As previous research has shown that younger people have a larger temporal binding window, this makes its harder for the researchers to compare the results from the ASD group to the SZ group.