UC Davis

This report presents preliminary data from an ongoing study of attention and sensory experiences in autistic adolescents. Although sensory differences in autism are widely-reported and impactful, particularly in the auditory modality, autism literature has only recently begun to attempt to distinguish auditory sensory phenotypes, such as emotional misophonic reactions to potentially-soft trigger sounds, versus hyperacusis-like reactions of finding highly intense sounds distressing, painful, or overwhelming; therefore, the first chapter of this thesis focuses on characterizing auditory sensory experiences in autism. Furthermore, although the monotropism hypothesis proposes that autistic hyper-focus is central to many autistic experiences, it has received little direct empirical research attention, particularly in cognitive science; the second chapter of this thesis aims to address this gap. Both chapters use a mixture of laboratory-based tasks and questionnaires.The preliminary sample includes 14 autistic and 17 typically-developing adolescents, aged 11–16 years. In Chapter 1, autistic participants exhibited psychoacoustic evidence of hyperacusis-like reactions, and questionnaire reports indicated they experienced more auditory sensory fear/overload, anxiety/avoidance, and generalized hyperreactivity. Psychoacoustic and self-report measures of misophonia, but not hyperacusis, appeared to converge with one another. In Chapter 2, caregiver-report questionnaires suggested autistic people experienced elevated hyper-focus; both caregivers and autistic people appeared to view hyper-focus somewhat favourably on average, with considerable individual variability in perspective. However, group differences in hyper-focus did not extend to laboratory task paradigms, emphasizing the need for further research to rigorously characterize the cognitive underpinnings of the hyper-focus experienced by autistic people in the real world. Interestingly, autistic people seemed to self-report less hyper-focus (Chapter 2) and fewer atypical sensory experiences (Chapter 1) than their caregivers’ proxy-reports indicated, whereas the opposite pattern characterized the comparison group. This pattern is not consistent with prior autism sensory literature, and possible interpretations are discussed.