Abstract
People with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are reported to have irregularities for crossmodal perception. Crossmodal correspondences are specific relationships among arbitrary crossmodal sensations (e.g., a brighter stimulus and a louder sound). Crossmodal correspondences are considered to be established by associative learning, but learning cues are assumed to be different among the types of correspondences. This study investigated the relationships between the crossmodal correspondences and the ASD traits. People with lower ASD trait value showed the dominant correspondence effect for the brightness-loudness and visual location-pitch pairs, whose correspondence cue is assumed as neural/perceptual and conceptual/linguistic similarities, respectively. For the visual size-pitch pair which is assumed to be acquired by statistical learning, the stronger ASD trait for detailed attention was related to stronger magnitude of the correspondence. These results suggest the unique relationships between the ASD traits and the crossmodal correspondences or the manner of sensory associative learning.
