Beyond Prior and Volatility: The Distinct Iterative Updating Account of ASD

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been widely reported to show atypicalities in predictive coding, though there remains a controversy regarding what causes such atypical processing. Suggestions range from overestimation of volatility to rigidity in the reaction to environmental changes. Here, we tested two accounts directly using duration reproduction of volatile and non-volatile interval sequences. Critically, both sequences had the same set of intervals but differed in their stimulus presentation orders. Comparing individuals with ASD vs. their matched controls, we found both groups to respond to the volatility in a similar manner, albeit with a generally reduced prior in the ASD group. Interestingly, though, relative to the control group, the ASD group exhibited a markedly reduced trust in the prior in the volatile trial session when this was performed after the non-volatile session, while both groups performed comparably in the reverse session order. Our findings suggest that it is not the learning of environmental volatility that is compromised in ASD. Rather, it is their response to a change of the volatility regimen from stable to volatile, which causes a highly inflexible weighting of prediction errors.

Contextual Information Modulates Pupil Size in Autistic Children

“…This may predict that the contextual inference of the bright sun should be weaker and drive the pupillary response less. However, since the original suggestion by Pellicano and Burr (2012), research suggests that autistic perception is not so much characterized by intrinsically weak priors, but by less flexible priors (Lawson et al, 2017;Shi et al, 2022). In our paradigm there was little unpredictability, with images that were always sun-like, or scrambled.…”

Neural processing of social reciprocity in autism

“…The predictability of the interactional behavior in the present study is one possible explanation for the diminished differences observed between autistic and non-autistic participants. With recent studies showing that temporal predictability might be particularly relevant for performance in autism (Shi et al, 2022), the predictability of timing during social exchange may be crucial for understanding issues with reciprocal interactions in autism and should be investigated further.…”

Atypical Pupil-Linked Arousal Induced by Low-Risk Probabilistic Choices, and Intolerance of Uncertainty in Adults with ASD

“…The authors interpreted blunted discriminative responses as indications that ASD subjects experienced a mild surprise due to overestimated environmental volatility independent of the true predictability of events. However, because of frequent transitions from stable to unstable task periods, the reversal learning task caused anxious participants with ASD to be subjectively uncertain about any choice they made and to view all options as risky (Shi et al, 2022). Therefore, the atypical pattern of PDR exhibited by subjects with ASD in the reversal learning paradigm, though informative, does not answer the question of why people with ASD lack confidence in tasks in which the choice-outcome contingency is stable, albeit probabilistic.…”