Children with autism do not show sequence effects with auditory stimuli.

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Connor, 1970;Rimland, 1964;Scheerer, Rothmann, & Goldstein, 1945). Some researchers have suggested that such difficulties may underpin or exacerbate difficulties processing social information (Gastgeb, Strauss, & Minshew, 2006;Klinger & Dawson, 1995). For example, a father struggled to teach his son with autism to stay away from strangers (Klinger & Dawson, 1995). Nosofsky, 1986) reported no differences between an ASD group and control group. Permanent repository linkOnce trained to criterion both participant groups categorized test phase items with similar accuracy and discriminated similarly between memory traces for exemplars (Bott, Brock, Brockdorff, Boucher, & Lamberts, 2006 Evidence that absolute magnitude information is not used comes from estimates of tone loudness, for example. These reflect the perceived magnitude of previous tones (i.e. sequence effects) rather than absolute magnitude information (Baird, Green, & Luce, 1980). To illustrate the influence of sequence effects on categorization, Stewart et al. (2002) designed the category contrast effect task. This paradigm uses stimuli comprising ten auditory tones (Tone 1 to Tone 10) spaced along a unidimensional continuum of pitch. Each tone represents a constant increase in perceived pitch that is associated with an increase in sound frequency by a constant ratio (Krumhansl, 2000;Shepard, 1982). Tones were presented in sequence and with feedback participants learnt to categorize them into two categories; low pitch (the five lowest tones) versus high pitch (the five highest tones).The key variable was response accuracy to the two tones closest to category boundary (Tone 5 and Tone 6). Each boundary tone was preceded by a distant tone (Tone 1 or Tone 10). the participant learns that one tone is "high", and the next tone is even higher, they know that tone will be high too. If the next tone is lower than the high tone, their decision will depend on the magnitude of perceptual difference between the current and preceding tone. For small changes, they are likely to repeat the original response, but larger changes induce a switch in category label. These strategies produce contrast effects in sequential stimuli. Difficulties have also been observed with verbal stimuli and context unfolding over time such as during homograph tasks (Frith & Snowling, 1983;Happé, 1997). These require the participant to read aloud either frequent or infrequent pronunciations of homographs embedded within a sentence that provides context (e.g. "In her eye / dress there was a big tear", Happé, 1997). Participants with autism show a tendency to produce contextually inappropriate frequent pronunciations of homographs. SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autism SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autismThese findings are captured by a general explanation of cognitive processing in SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autism 7 autism, the weak central coherence account (Frith, 1989;Happé, 1994a). Frith (1989) co...

Perceptual bias reveals slow-updating in autism and fast-forgetting in dyslexia

“…1d). Yet, in line with previous studies 11,[19][20][21] , the magnitude of the bias was significantly smaller in both the ASD and the dyslexia groups compared with their corresponding, matched neurotypical groups (two sample t-tests; 56 = 2.07, = 0.04, presented sequentially, with a quiet inter-stimulus-interval (ISI). Participants then decided whether the 1 st or 2 nd tone had a higher pitch by pressing "1" or "2" and received a visual feedback.…”

“…Indeed, there are theoretical reasons to expect non-linear longer-term dependence 16 . Yet, previous studies have only used linear methods 11,17,21,23,26 . To study the bias with non-linear modeling, we conducted a new experiment online via the Mechanical Turk platform (Materials and Methods;…”

“…Individuals with ASD are less affected by recent information 21 and show slower adaptation 10,32 compared to neurotypical individuals. They show a dissociation between adequate learning of longer-term statistics, as suggested by their intact categorical representations 14 , and impaired integration of recent information.…”

The world as we know it and the world as it is: Eye‐movement patterns reveal decreased use of prior knowledge in individuals with autism

“…However, to date, the evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed. On the one hand, the results of some of the studies support the hypo‐priors account, for example, Goris et al [] found that individuals with ASD are less flexible in modulating their predictions, while Molesworth et al [] reported decreased effect of prior experience in the form of sequence effects on categorization. Similarly, Turi et al [] found reduced adaptation to numbers, which the authors explain in terms of decreased use of past experience on current perceptual decisions.…”

Disentangling signal and noise in autism spectrum disorder

“…Hence, weaker (i.e., lower precision or less confidence in) top-down predictions would also lead to increased reliance on bottom-up information as in the ''weak priors" account (Pellicano & Burr, 2012). The importance of relative precisions, however, also implies that studies that find reduced adaptation in behavior or reduced repetition suppression in fMRI responses in ASD (or high autism traits) (e.g., Ewbank et al, 2014;Molesworth, Chevallier, Happé, & Hampton, 2015;Turi et al, 2015) cannot simply be considered evidence for the weaker priors thesis, even though both adaptation and repetition suppression are thought to be the result of (top-down) predictive activity (Chopin & Mamassian, 2012;Summerfield, Trittschuh, Monti, Mesulam, & Egner, 2008).…”