No evidence for impaired multisensory integration of low-level audiovisual stimuli in adolescents and young adults with autism spectrum disorders

• We measured multisensory processing in people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).
• ASDs were relative to controls impaired in judgments of visual temporal order.
• ASDs performed like controls in visual search and visual orienting.
• ASDs profited like controls from click sounds in all visual tasks.
• ASDs have no impairments in the integration of low-level audiovisual stimuli.

Abrupt click sounds can improve the visual processing of flashes in several ways. Here, we examined this in high functioning adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) using three tasks: (1) a task where clicks improve sensitivity for visual temporal order (temporal ventriloquism); (2) a task where a click improves visual search (pip-and-pop), and (3) a task where a click speeds up the visual orienting to a peripheral target (clock reading). Adolescents with ASD were, compared to adolescents with typical development (TD), impaired in judgments of visual temporal order, but they were unimpaired in visual search and orienting. Importantly, in all tasks visual performance of the ASD group improved by the presence of clicks by at least equal amounts as in the TD group. This suggests that adolescents and young adults with ASD show no generalized deficit in the multisensory integration of low-level audiovisual stimuli and/or the phasic alerting by abrupt sounds.