Unraveling the nature of autism: finding order amid change

Abstract

In this article, we hypothesize that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are born with a deficit in invariance detection, which is a learning process whereby people and animals come to attend the relatively stable patterns or structural regularities in the changing stimulus array. This paper synthesizes a substantial body of research which suggests that a deficit in the domain-general perceptual learning process of invariant detection in ASD can lead to a cascade of consequences in different developmental domains. We will outline how this deficit in invariant detection can cause uncertainty, unpredictability, and a lack of control for individuals with ASD and how varying degrees of impairments in this learning process can account for the heterogeneity of the ASD phenotype. We also describe how differences in neural plasticity in ASD underlie the impairments in perceptual learning. The present account offers an alternative to prior theories and contributes to the challenge of understanding the developmental trajectories that result in the variety of autistic behaviors.

Disrupted development and imbalanced function in the global neuronal workspace: a positive-feedback mechanism for the emergence of ASD in early infancy

“…We describe how multiple distinct GNW imbalances can be expected to result, given exposure to a typical infant environment, in cognitive-affective outcomes typical of ASD. We then show that the functional disruptions proposed to be associated with ASD by Fields (2012a), Pellicano and Burr (2012), Lawson et al (2014), Van de Cruys et al (2014) and Hellendoorn et al (2015) can be characterized within this integrative framework. Finally, we comment on further extensions of the model and the possibility of direct experimental tests.…”

“…This representation must, moreover, be stable across periods of nonobservation and against changes in location and minor changes in features. Infants must, for example, learn that changes in clothing-which may be highly visually salient-do not indicate changes in the identity of an individual person (reviewed by Fields 2012b); failures to recognize perceptual invariants that indicate object identity have, indeed, been proposed as an underlying functional correlate of ASD (Hellendoorn et al 2015). Typically-developing infants achieve this level of objecttoken integration and stability for dozens if not hundreds of individual objects within the first year.…”

“…Along similar lines, Pelphrey et al (2011) proposed that early dysfunction in posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS), a component of the mirror system, induced dysfunction throughout the ''social brain'' network and hence dysfunctions in social cognition. More recently, a number of authors have proposed second-generation models of ASD as primarily disorders of perceptual categorization and/or the generation and evaluation of perceptual expectations, and have shown that the social interaction, language, and other typical presentations of ASD can be explained on this basis (Fields 2012a;Pellicano and Burr 2012;Lawson et al 2014; Van de Cruys et al 2014;Hellendoorn et al 2015). These models suggest a number of different underlying mechanisms: Fields (2012a) attributes ASD to disrupted category learning, Pellicano and Burr (2012) to attenuated top-down perceptual expectations, Lawson et al (2014) and Van de Cruys et al (2014) to overly-precise representations of differences between expectations and perceptions, and Hellendoorn et al (2015) to deficits in the detection of perceptual invariances.…”

The dog (Canis familiaris) as a translational model of autism: It is high time we move from promise to reality

“…An even more recent account of the mechanisms underlying autistic behavior in humans proposes that many of autism's salient traits may be manifestations of a single underlying impairment of perception of the probabilistic nature of environmental regularities (atypical tolerance for prediction error, Hellendoorn, Wijnroks, & Leseman, 2015;Sinha et al, 2014;Van de Cruys, Van der Hallen, & Wagemans, 2017). That is, people with ASD perceive and respond to violations to their predictions atypically due to their "low and inflexible" tolerance for prediction error.…”

Response to changing contingencies in infants at high and low risk for autism spectrum disorder

“…One recently proposed domain‐general account of ASD development hypothesizes that individuals with the disorder may have difficulty using prior experiences to predict future events [see Hellendoorn, Wijnroks, & Leseman, ; Northrup, ; Sinha et al, ]. In particular, these theories suggest that individuals with ASD have difficulty anticipating future events due to a deficit in learning predictive relationships or structural regularities in the environment.…”