Autistic and nonautistic adolescents do not differ in adaptation to gaze direction

Abstract

Predictive processing accounts of autism posit that autistic individuals' perception is less biased by expectations than nonautistic individuals', perhaps through stronger precision‐weighting of prediction errors. Since precision‐weighting is fundamental to all information processing, under this theory, the differences between autistic and nonautistic individuals should be domain‐general and observable in both behavior and brain responses. This study used EEG, behavioral responses, and eye‐tracking co‐registration during gaze‐direction adaptation, to investigate whether increased precision‐weighting of prediction errors is evident through smaller adaptation after‐effects in autistic adolescents compared with nonautistic peers. Multilevel modeling showed that autistic and nonautistic adolescents' responses were consistent with behavioral adaptation, with Bayesian statistics providing extremely strong evidence for the absence of a group difference. Cluster‐based permutation testing of ERP responses did not show the expected adaptation after‐effect but did show habituation to repeated stimulus presentation, and no group difference was detected, a result not consistent with the theoretical account. Combined with the few other available studies, the current findings raise challenges for the theory, suggesting no fundamental difference in precision‐weighting of prediction errors in autism.

Interoception in Autism: A Narrative Review of Behavioral and Neurobiological Data

“…The authors suggested that in autism, there is an increased focus on sensory error signals in both exteroceptive and interoceptive domains, which may be inferred as an increased influence of error signals when generating predictions based on sensory input. 28 , 77 However, as previously discussed, predictive models remain untested and debated for the interoception (and also debated for exteroception in autism; see Sapey-Triomphe et al; 78 Cannon et al; 79 Finnemann et al; 80 Ward et al 81 ). Thus, this unified theoretical framework remains empirically untested.…”