Precise minds in uncertain worlds: Predictive coding in autism.

Abstract

There have been numerous attempts to explain the enigma of autism, but existing neurocognitive theories often provide merely a refined description of 1 cluster of symptoms. Here we argue that deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence can all be understood as the consequence of a core deficit in the flexibility with which people with autism spectrum disorder can process violations to their expectations. More formally we argue that the human mind processes information by making and testing predictions and that the errors resulting from violations to these predictions are given a uniform, inflexibly high weight in autism spectrum disorder. The complex, fluctuating nature of regularities in the world and the stochastic and noisy biological system through which people experience it require that, in the real world, people not only learn from their errors but also need to (meta-)learn to sometimes ignore errors. Especially when situations (e.g., social) or stimuli (e.g., faces) become too complex or dynamic, people need to tolerate a certain degree of error in order to develop a more abstract level of representation. Starting from an inability to flexibly process prediction errors, a number of seemingly core deficits become logically secondary symptoms. Moreover, an insistence on sameness or the acting out of stereotyped and repetitive behaviors can be understood as attempts to provide a reassuring sense of predictive success in a world otherwise filled with error. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Susceptibility to Optical Illusions Varies as a Function of the Autism-Spectrum Quotient but not in Ways Predicted by Local–Global Biases

“…Pellicano & Burr (2012) proposed that the use of priors in persons with ASD is attenuated relative to typically developing people and therefore the active process of 4 formulating and testing hypotheses about the world is more immune to suggestion, which results in a tendency to perceive the world more objectively, and a desire to be in more familiar settings. Similar accounts have been developed over the last few years by other researchers (e.g., Davis & Plaisted-Grant, 2015;Lawson, Rees, & Friston, 2014;van Boxtel & Lu, 2013;Van de Cruys et al, 2014).…”

Autonomic and brain responses associated with empathy deficits in autism spectrum disorder

“…Physiologically, this precision or attention is thought to be mediated by the postsynaptic gain or sensitivity of neuronal populations reporting prediction error (Bastos, et al, 2012). The specific failure in ASD has been attributed to a relative increase in the precision of sensory evidence and over the precision of higher (extrasensory) beliefs (Friston, et al, 2013b; Lawson, et al, 2014; Pellicano and Burr, 2012; Quattrocki and Friston, 2014; Van de Cruys, et al, 2014). …”

“…Crucially, it has been hypothesized that aberrantly high precision in the interoceptive domain might account for selective socio-emotional deficits in ASD (Friston, et al, 2014; Van de Cruys, et al, 2014), given the intimate relationship between autonomic responses, their related cortical responses, and socio-emotional awareness. These proposals provide a useful framework for a quantitative and mechanistic understanding of socio-emotional deficits in ASD in terms of failures in Bayesian inference, leading to false inference about interoceptive and emotional states, particularly in the context of prosocial and affiliative interactions.…”

Fragile Spectral and Temporal Auditory Processing in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Early Language Delay

“…It has been suggested that the increased sensitivity to fine-grained spectral changes may impede speech development in ASD by generating overly specific categories of sounds that inhibit learning of higher-level abstract patterns (Crespi 2013;Järvinen-Pasley et al 2008a, b;Van de Cruys et al 2014). In typically developing infants there is a natural shift from an initial focus on absolute pitch to the eventual dominance of relative pitch (Saffran and Griepentrog 2001;Stalinski and Schellenberg 2010).…”