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Query: UMLS:C0004352 (autism)
 32,579 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Autism is a complex disorder, characterized by social, cognitive, communicative, and motor symptoms. One suggestion, proposed in the current study, to explain the spectrum of symptoms is an underlying impairment in multisensory integration (MSI) systems such as a mirror neuron-like system. The mirror neuron system, thought to play a critical role in skills such as imitation, empathy, and language can be thought of as a multisensory system, converting sensory stimuli into motor representations. Consistent with this, we report preliminary evidence for deficits in a task thought to tap into MSI--"the bouba-kiki task" in children with ASD. The bouba-kiki effect is produced when subjects are asked to pair nonsense shapes with nonsense "words". We found that neurotypical children chose the nonsense "word" whose phonemic structure corresponded with the visual shape of the stimuli 88% of the time. This is presumably because of mirror neuron-like multisensory systems that integrate the visual shape with the corresponding motor gestures used to pronounce the nonsense word. Surprisingly, individuals with ASD only chose the corresponding name 56% of the time. The poor performance by the ASD group on this task suggests a deficit in MSI, perhaps related to impaired MSI brain systems. Though this is a behavioral study, it provides a testable hypothesis for the communication impairments in children with ASD that implicates a specific neural system and fits well with the current findings suggesting an impairment in the mirror systems in individuals with ASD.
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PMID:Preliminary evidence for deficits in multisensory integration in autism spectrum disorders: the mirror neuron hypothesis. 1897 85

The bouba-kiki effect refers to the correspondence between arbitrary visual and auditory stimuli. Previous studies indicate ASD persons' reduced bouba-kiki effect compared to controls. This study examines the relation between ASD symptomology and performance on the bouba-kiki task. Twenty ASD participants and 20 matched controls were presented the bouba-kiki task. Autism-Quotient (AQ) scores and several cognitive measures were obtained for all participants. Results demonstrate that among all measures, only AQ scores were significantly correlated to the performance on the bouba-kiki task in the ASD group. Results thus support the existence of a relation between autism symptoms and performance on the bouba-kiki task, and are discussed in light of current theories.
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PMID:The bouba-kiki effect and its relation to the Autism Quotient (AQ) in autistic adolescents. 2898 67

We performed a registered replication of the Oberman and Ramachandran (Soc Neurosci 3(3-4):348-355, 2008) study on the 'kiki/bouba' effect in autism spectrum conditions (ASC). The aim of the study was to test the robustness of the diminished crossmodal correspondences effect in autism, but also to verify whether this effect is not an artifact of differences in intelligence. We tested a Polish-speaking sample of 21 participants with ADOS-confirmed autism spectrum conditions (mean age 15.90) and 21 age- (mean age 15.86), sex- and IQ-matched neurotypical control participants. Procedure closely followed the replicated study. Participants' task was to match five pairs of unfamiliar words and shapes. Matching words and shapes had similar supramodal characteristics that allowed the match. We report partial replication of the diminished 'kiki/bouba' effect in individuals with ASC compared to the neurotypical control group. However, we found that nonverbal intelligence also significantly contributed to task performance, but only in participants with autism, suggesting a compensatory role of intelligence. Finally, the effect of autism severity (measured by ADOS classification) was significant-crossmodal correspondences were weaker in individuals with autism, compared to those with autism spectrum diagnosis.
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PMID:Silent shapes and shapeless sounds: the robustness of the diminished crossmodal correspondences effect in autism spectrum conditions. 3086 1