Can gaze-cueing be helpful for detecting sound in autism spectrum disorder?

• We examined the joint attention effect under visual–auditory cross-modal in ASD.
• Impaired joint attention was found in ASD when tone was used as a target.
• Intact joint attention was found in ASD when voice was used as a target.
• The cue–target relationship is important for the appearance of joint attention in ASD.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, including joint attention, but psychological studies generally have reported intact gaze-triggered joint attention in ASD. These studies used a uni-modal paradigm (i.e. visual cue–target pairs) with eyes or faces as cues and letters or dots as targets. However, it has not been determined whether joint attention is impaired under cross-modal conditions in ASD, although cross-modal impairment has been reported. This study investigated joint attention in ASD under cross-modal conditions with gaze stimuli as visual cues and two kinds of sound (social voice or non-social tone) stimuli as targets. The task for the subject was to locate the target sound and click as soon and as accurately as possible. The ASD group was impaired in joint attention when a tone was used as the target, while both groups showed joint attention to a voice. The results suggest that cross-modal joint attention is impaired in the ASD group when the cue–target relationship is weak (i.e. social cue and non-social target) while it is unimpaired when there is a strong cue–target relationship (i.e. social cue and social target).