Multisensory salience

We experience the world around us with more than one sensory organ, and most of the time we need to combine this information to make everyday decisions: To extract crucial aspects of a conversation with another person, you might not only listen to the words that are being said, but you probably also look at the facial expressions of the other person to understand tonality. Information from these sensory organs needs to be combined as a coherent piece to determine your own future reactions. Interestingly, some aspects of these multisensory events might stand out more to us (be more salient) than others, for different reasons. Apart from a sound, a smell, or a taste being more intense or louder (sensory salience), there could also be more subtle things influencing the saliency of an event. They might differ in their subjective value (motivationally salient), they might occur with a different frequency (statistical salience), or you might get a different amount of information from this event (informational salience).

In autism research, atypical sensory processing has been researched a lot, given that sensory hypo- and hyperreactivity is one of the hallmarks of ASD. However, these studies usually focus on the sensory salience aspect and less on the other types of saliency that come with it.

Building upon the task Dr. Jae-Chang Kim designed (Kim et al., 2024) to disentangle valenced and generic probability and uncertainty using a ‘juice-machine’ to deliver gustatory feedback in a unisensory Pavlovian paradigm, I will use a multisensory adaptation to assess how different types of saliency impact reaction times, pupil responses, and how they are processed in the brain, using fMRI, across the autistic spectrum and in comparison to neurotypicals.