The Relationship Between Autism and Pitch Perception is Modulated by Cognitive Abilities

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.