Abstract
Previous studies reported mixed findings on autistic individuals’ pitch perception relative to neurotypical (NT) individuals. We investigated whether this may be partly due to individual differences in cognitive abilities by comparing their performance on various pitch perception tasks on a large sample (n = 164) of autistic and NT children and adults. Our findings revealed that: (i) autistic individuals either showed similar or worse performance than NT individuals on the pitch tasks; (ii) cognitive abilities were associated with some pitch task performance; and (iii) cognitive abilities modulated the relationship between autism diagnosis and pitch perception on some tasks. Our findings highlight the importance of taking an individual differences approach to understand the strengths and weaknesses of pitch processing in autism.
| Original language | English |
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| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 29 Aug 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding:This work was supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (CAASD, 678733) awarded to FL and CJ. JHO was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 887283. The funding bodies had no role in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript.
Funding
JHO, CJ, and FL designed the study, which was made possible from a grant secured by CJ and FL. JHO, CZ, AB, FYNL, AV, and LW collected the data. JHO analysed the data and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.