Pre-attentive processing in autism spectrum disorder / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder.Its typical symptoms include social disorder, stereotyped behavior and restrictive interest.In addition, sensory abnormality is also a common symptom of ASD individuals.Pre-attentive processing is an automatic cognitive process that takes place before attention and is independent of consciousness, which reflects the ability to automatically detect changes in the environment of brain.Many researches show that the sensory abnormality and social ability disorder in ASD patients may be related to the defects in the pre-attentive processing stage.Mismatch negativity (MMN) is the most commonly used indicator of pre-attentive processing.ASD individuals show abnormal MMN in response to both social and non-social stimulus.Among them, the pre-attentive processing defect of non-social stimuli in ASD individuals is manifested as the amplitude or latency of MMN induced by single tones, voice or visual stimuli, which is different from that of normal people.The pre-attentive processing defect of social stimuli in ASD individuals is manifested as the amplitude or latency of MMN induced by emotional voice and emotional face, which is different from that of normal people.This result not only helps to find the physiological mechanism of sensory and social disorders in ASD individuals, but also provides theoretical support for MMN as an auxiliary diagnostic index of ASD.Future research on the pre-attentive processing of ASD individuals should pay more attention to enriching the research paradigms of MMN and adopting more kinds of social stimuli.At the same time, the influence of ASD genetic factors on MMN can also be one of the concerns of future research.