Special treatment of prediction errors in autism spectrum disorder

Todorova, Greta; Pollick, Frank E.; Muckli, Lars

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.108070

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Autistic individuals reportedly focus on details over holistic percepts following shifts in neurocognitive processing supporting meta-learning. Similar neural mechanisms underlying these features among individuals on the broad autism spectrum may be reflected in those experiencing misophonia ( Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2015 ; Smith et al, 2020 ; Todorova et al, 2021 ). Adjusted expectations about sensory experience potentially explains both symptom severity and behaviors in response to trigger exposure signifying one potential mechanism for sensory processing symptoms and symptoms of neuropsychiatric conditions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Toward a Multidimensional Understanding of Misophonia Using Cluster-Based Phenotyping

et al. 2022

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Misophonia is a condition characterized by hypersensitivity and strong emotional reactivity to specific auditory stimuli. Misophonia clinical presentations are relatively complex and reflect individualized experiences across clinical populations. Like some overlapping neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders, misophonia is potentially syndromic where symptom patterns rather than any one symptom contribute to diagnosis. The current study conducted an exploratory k-means cluster analysis to evaluate symptom presentation in a non-clinical sample of young adult undergraduate students (N = 343). Individuals participated in a self-report spectrum characteristics survey indexing misophonia, tinnitus severity, sensory hypersensitivity, and social and psychiatric symptoms. Results supported a three-cluster solution that split participants on symptom presentation: cluster 1 presented with more severe misophonia symptoms but few overlapping formally diagnosed psychiatric co-occurring conditions; cluster 3 was characterized by a more nuanced clinical presentation of misophonia with broad-band sensory hypersensitivities, tinnitus, and increased incidence of social processing and psychiatric symptoms, and cluster 2 was relatively unaffected by misophonia or other sensitivities. Clustering results illustrate the spectrum characteristics of misophonia where symptom patterns range from more “pure” form misophonia to presentations that involve more broad-range sensory-related and psychiatric symptoms. Subgroups of individuals with misophonia may characterize differential neuropsychiatric risk patterns and stem from potentially different causative factors, highlighting the importance of exploring misophonia as a multidimensional condition of complex etiology.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Toward a Multidimensional Understanding of Misophonia Using Cluster-Based Phenotyping

et al. 2022

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“…All authors have previous experience in qualitative research. The first author’s doctoral thesis focused on testing the validity of the HIPPEA theory (Todorova, 2021), which gave them a more theoretical understanding. Their experience of sharing their understanding of HIPPEA with autistic individuals prompted the current investigation into its relation to autistic experiences.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The world is nuanced but pixelated: Autistic individuals’ perspective on HIPPEA

Todorova

Hatton

Sadique

et al. 2023

Autism

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Little attention has been given to the voice of autistic individuals during the development of theories that are trying to explain the condition. This can often make individuals feel that they have to fit into the theory’s definition, rather than it fitting into their experience. We aimed to understand to what extent the HIPPEA (High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism) theory resonates with the lived experiences of autistic individuals. We conducted 21 questionnaires and 8 follow-up interviews and used a hybrid (deductive and inductive) approach to analyse the data. Based on the participants’ views, HIPPEA provides an explanation for many of the lived experiences of autistic individuals. However, refinement is needed with respect to interpersonal interactions, emotional processing and individuals’ motivation to engage with their environment despite challenges with the way the world is organised. Furthermore, more details are needed for the theory to accurately allow us to understand autism. Lay Abstract Autism is a condition comprised of difficulties in social and communication contexts, sensory sensitivities as well as restrictive and repetitive behaviours. Many theories have tried to explain all the symptoms and behaviours associated with autism. We focus on one recent theory – High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism (HIPPEA). We aim to understand how much this theory fits the experiences of autistic individuals. We collected data through 21 online questionnaires and 8 follow-up interviews. One of our participants was a parent of an autistic child, and the remaining were adults who reported a diagnosis of autism. We analysed the data by thinking about how it fitted with what we already knew and by looking for new insights which came up. Our results suggest that autistic individuals can make generalisations but that this happens more slowly across both social and non-social areas. These generalisations are very reliant on detail – in computer terms, they are ‘pixelated’. This is in line with what HIPPEA suggests. We also showed that autistic individuals can be motivated to explore and engage socially, something that needs more consideration within HIPPEA. Overall, this study shows that HIPPEA can explain many autistic experiences, but that further refinement is needed.

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“…Ewbank et al (2016) reported that neural response was unrelated to autistic traits on a repetition suppression task; Powell et al (2016) found that autistic traits did not uniquely explain sensory thresholds. Todorova et al (2021) reported that autistic participants were comparable to control participants on an alternate forced choice task and that both groups showed equal performance on the motion and control tasks (performance in the autism group was poorer for detecting targets, but this was driven by one autistic outlier).…”

Section: Perceptual Decision-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decision-making in autism: A narrative review

Plas

Mason

Happé

2023

Autism

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Autistic people often have an atypical profile of abilities: while excelling in some structured paradigms, many report difficulties with making real-life decisions. To test whether decision-making in autism is different from in typically developing controls, we reviewed 104 studies that compared decision-making performance between autistic and comparison participants ( N = 2712 autistic and N = 3189 comparison participants) between 1998 and 2022. Our searches revealed four main decision-making paradigms that are widely used in the field of decision neuroscience: perceptual discrimination, reward learning, metacognition and value-based decision-making paradigm. Our synthesis highlights that perceptual processing and reward learning were similar between autistic and comparison participants, whereas value-based decision-making and metacognitive accuracy were often different between groups. Furthermore, decision-making differences were most pronounced when the autistic participant was explicitly probed to report on an internal belief, while implicit markers of the same decision (e.g. error-related response times) were usually not different. Our findings provide evidence in favour of a metacognitive explanation of decision-making atypicalities in autism. Lay summary Many autistic people report difficulties with real-life decision-making. However, when doing decision-making tests in laboratory experiments, autistic people often perform as well or better than non-autistic people. We review previously published studies on autistic people’s decision-making, across different types of tests, to understand what type of decision-making is more challenging. To do this, we searched four databases of research papers. We found 104 studies that tested, in total, 2712 autistic and 3189 comparison participants on different decision-making tasks. We found that there were four categories of decision-making tests that were used in these experiments: perceptual (e.g. deciding which image has the most dots); reward learning (e.g. learning which deck of cards gives the best reward); metacognition (e.g. knowing how well you perform or what you want); and value-based (e.g. making a decision based on a choice between two outcomes that differ in value to you). Overall, these studies suggest that autistic and comparison participants tend to perform similarly well at perceptual and reward-learning decisions. However, autistic participants tended to decide differently from comparison participants on metacognition and value-based paradigms. This suggests that autistic people might differ from typically developing controls in how they evaluate their own performance and in how they make decisions based on weighing up the subjective value of two different options. We suggest these reflect more general differences in metacognition, thinking about thinking, in autism.

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Special treatment of prediction errors in autism spectrum disorder

Cited by 6 publications

References 37 publications

Toward a Multidimensional Understanding of Misophonia Using Cluster-Based Phenotyping

Toward a Multidimensional Understanding of Misophonia Using Cluster-Based Phenotyping

The world is nuanced but pixelated: Autistic individuals’ perspective on HIPPEA

Decision-making in autism: A narrative review

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