Certain perceptual impairments in autism spectrum disorder may be associated with a heightened sensitivity to sensory noise rather than with deficiencies in sensory integration, according to a study. People with autism often exhibit high performance in tasks involving perception of individual elements and low performance in tasks requiring global perception, a phenomenon often attributed to a deficiency in global perceptual integration. To test the alternative hypothesis that people with autism are highly sensitive to noisy sensory signals, Adam Zaidel and colleagues presented a visual perception task of varying difficulty to 14 people with autism, and independently varied the amount of visual noise in the test. The authors found that participants exhibited unimpaired perception of self-motion through a noiseless environment, but that the introduction of noise significantly affected participants' perception. Further, when visual stimuli were paired with inertial motion, perceived via the inner ear vestibular system, people with autism displayed intact multisensory integration of motion, even in the presence of noise. The results suggest that people with autism may experience a decreased use of prior sensory knowledge that could lead to increased reliance on incoming sensory stimuli and a heightened sensitivity to noise, according to the authors.