Structural and contextual priors affect visual search in children with and without autism

Abstract

Bayesian predictive coding theories of autism spectrum disorder propose that impaired acquisition or a broader shape of prior probability distributions lies at the core of the condition. However, we still know very little about how probability distributions are learned and encoded by children, let alone children with autism.Here, we take advantage of a recently developed distribution learning paradigm to characterize how children with and without autism acquire information about probability distributions. Twenty-four autistic and 25-matched neurotypical children searched for an odd-one-out target among a set of distractor lines with orientations sampled from a Gaussian distribution repeated across multiple trials to allow for learning of the parameters (mean and variance) of the distribution. We could measure the width (variance) of the participant's encoded distribution by introducing a target-distractor role-reversal while varying the similarity between target and previous distractor mean. Both groups performed similarly on the visual search task and learned the distractor distribution to a similar extent. However, the variance learned was much broader than the one presented, consistent with less informative priors in children irrespective of autism diagnosis. These findings have important implications for Bayesian accounts of perception throughout development, and Bayesian accounts of autism specifically.Lay summary: Recent theories about the underlying cognitive mechanisms of autism propose that the way autistic individuals estimate variability or uncertainty in their perceptual environment may differ from how typical individuals do so. Children had to search an oddly tilted line in a set of lines pointing in different directions, and based on their response times we examined how they learned about the variability in a set of objects. We found that autistic children learn variability as well as typical children, but both groups learn with less precision than typical adults do on the same task.

Beyond over- or under-sampling: autistic children’s inflexibility in sampling costly information

“…A second limitation is the sample size (i.e., the number of participants). The sample size of our study lines up with those of recent related studies on decision-making, learning, and inference in autistic children or adults [61, 65, 85–93], leading to robust findings that accorded with those found in adults with varying autistic traits [22]. However, if we had had resources to test more participants (the high functional autistic children is relatively rare), we would be able to refine subtyping based on our computational model parameters, which could offer more insights into each individual and ASD per se [94–96].…”

“…For example, compared to neurotypical individuals, autistic people have shown superior performance in visual search and embedded figures tasks [55], as well as an attenuated McGurk effect, indicative of less integration of visual and auditory cues [56]. Prior research on these theories predominantly addressed perceptual inference [57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66], but both the detail-focused cognitive style and the improper weighting between prior beliefs and new information could manifest in various facets. Our findings align with this detail-oriented cognitive style, where autistic children prioritize recently gathered evidence (i.e., local information) over historical data from previous trials and samples (i.e., global information) in their sampling decisions.…”

Individuals with autism show non-adaptive relative weighting of perceptual prior and sensory reliability

“…However, contrary to these claims of uniformly weak priors (Pellicano & Burr, 2012), there is evidence for intact use of perceptual expectations and prior belief in ASD, for both natural and task-related priors (e.g. Feigin et al, 2021;Manning et al, 2017;Van de Cruys et al, 2021). Several studies report that individuals with autism often develop very strong priors or expectations in particular contexts.…”

A case study on the effect of light and colors in the built environment on autistic children’s behavior

“…According to the literature, sensory difficulties and processing disorders appear to be more prevalent in autistic children and ASD is perceived to be the root cause of their sensory system ( 30 ). People with sensory processing disorders are generally classified as hypo and hypersensitive (under and over-responsiveness).…”