Habituation, Adaptation and Prediction Processes in Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Habituation, the simplest form of learning preserved across species and evolution, is characterized by a response decrease as a stimulus is repeated. This adaptive function has been shown to be altered in some psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or schizophrenia. At the brain level, habituation is characterized by a decrease in neural activity as a stimulation is repeated, referred to as neural adaptation. This phenomenon influences the ability to make predictions and to detect change, two processes altered in some neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. In this comprehensive review, the objectives are to characterize habituation, neural adaptation, and prediction throughout typical development and in neurodevelopmental disorders; and to evaluate their implication in symptomatology, specifically in sensitivity to change or need for sameness. A summary of the different approaches to investigate adaptation will be proposed, in which we report the contribution of animal studies as well as electrophysiological studies in humans to understanding of underlying neuronal mechanisms.

Development of a Self-Report Measure of Prediction in Daily Life: The Prediction-Related Experiences Questionnaire

“…First, measures of prediction typically investigate a single predictive process, domain, or phenomenon (e.g., visual, motor, auditory). Indeed, reviews of prediction-related tasks in the field of autism (Cannon et al, 2021;Merchie & Gomot, 2023) show a trend of testing a single behavioral or neural measure, as opposed to multiple measures that together may better reflect the multifaceted phenomenon of prediction. There are currently few behavioral and no self-report measures that incorporate the multiple modalities that make up the complex phenomenon of prediction.…”

Habituation to threats in times of crisis: Lessons from the temporal trajectory of risk perceptions throughout COVID-19

“…Relatedly, prior research has established that humans have a propensity to recover baseline states after initial reactions to external shocks (Solomon, 1980)-e.g., following the initial impact of severe debilitating accidents, people tend to return to normal life satisfaction levels despite the permanent consequences of these accidents (Diener et al, 2009). These tendencies underlying habituation to chronic conditions confer an adaptive advantage by supporting change detection-i.e., they help organisms attend to potentially important new information in their environments (Ardiel et al, 2017;Merchie & Gomot, 2023).…”