Contextual priors do not modulate action prediction in children with autism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2015
Recent predictive processing accounts of perception and action point towards a key challenge for the nervous system in dynamically optimising the balance between incoming sensory information and existing expectations regarding the state of the environment. Here we report differences in the influence of the preceding sensory context on motor function, varying with respect to both clinical and subclinical features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Reach-to-grasp movements were recorded subsequent to an inactive period in which illusory ownership of a prosthetic limb was induced. We analysed the sub-components of reach trajectories derived using a minimum-jerk fitting procedure. Nonclinical adults low in autistic features showed disrupted movement execution following the illusion compared to a control condition. In contrast, individuals higher in autistic features (both those with ASD and nonclinical individuals high in autistic traits) showed reduced sensitivity to the presence of the illusion in their reaching movements while still exhibiting the typical perceptual effects of the illusion. Clinical individuals were distinct from nonclinical individuals scoring high in autistic features, however, in the early stages of movement. These results suggest that the influence of high-level representations of the environment differs between individuals, contributing to clinical and subclinical differences in motor performance that manifest in a contextual manner. Since high level representations of context help to explain fluctuations in sensory input over relatively longer time scales, more circumscribed sensitivity to prior or contextual information in autistic sensory processing could contribute more generally to reduced social comprehension, sensory impairments and a stronger desire for predictability and routine.
Predicting ensuing actions in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders
Experimental Brain Research, 2010
This study investigated the ability to predict others' action in a group of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (n = 18). Their performance was compared with a group of children with mental retardation (n = 13) and a group of children with typical development (n = 19). Participants were presented with short incomplete videotaped movies showing an actor executing familiar and non-familiar actions. When asked to predict the outcome, participants with ASD produced fewer correct responses and their performance did not improve for familiar actions, as compared to both comparison groups. In addition, they committed a greater number of errors of temporal inversion. These results provide new evidence that an impaired means-end analysis process, leading to a diminished sensitivity to the sequence structure of goal-directed actions, would disrupt the ability to understand and predict others' actions. The comprehension of abnormalities in event knowledge provides a better insight of some of the problems that individuals with ASD encounter in spontaneously understanding real-life social situations.
Predictive action perception from explicit intention information in autism
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2021
Social difficulties in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may originate from a reduced top-down modulation of sensory information that prevents the spontaneous attribution of intentions to observed behaviour. However, although people with autism are able to explicitly reason about others' mental states, the effect of abstract intention information on perceptual processes has remained untested. ASD participants (n = 23) and a neurotypical (NT) control group (n = 23) observed a hand either reaching for an object or withdrawing from it. Prior to action onset, the participant either instructed the actor to "Take it" or "Leave it", or heard the actor state "I'll take it" or "I'll leave it", which provided an explicit intention that was equally likely to be congruent or incongruent with the subsequent action. The hand disappeared before completion of the action, and participants reported the last seen position of the tip of the index finger by touching the screen. NT participants exhibited a predictive bias in response to action direction (reaches perceived nearer the object, withdrawals perceived farther away), and in response to prior knowledge of the actor's intentions (nearer the object after "Take it", farther away after "Leave it"). However, ASD participants exhibited a predictive perceptual bias only in response to the explicit intentions, but not in response to the motion of the action itself. Perception in ASD is not immune from top-down modulation. However, the information must be explicitly presented independently from the stimulus itself, and not inferred from cues inherent in the stimulus.
Autistic Traits Differently Account for Context-Based Predictions of Physical and Social Events
Brain Sciences, 2020
Autism is associated with difficulties in making predictions based on contextual cues. Here, we investigated whether the distribution of autistic traits in the general population, as measured through the Autistic Quotient (AQ), is associated with alterations of context-based predictions of social and non-social stimuli. Seventy-eight healthy participants performed a social task, requiring the prediction of the unfolding of an action as interpersonal (e.g., to give) or individual (e.g., to eat), and a non-social task, requiring the prediction of the appearance of a moving shape as a short (e.g., square) or a long (e.g., rectangle) figure. Both tasks consisted of (i) a familiarization phase, in which the association between each stimulus type and a contextual cue was manipulated with different probabilities of co-occurrence, and (ii) a testing phase, in which visual information was impoverished by early occlusion of video display, thus forcing participants to rely on previously learne...
2012_Anticipating action intentions in Autism Spectrum Disorder
We investigated whether individuals with a mild form of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are influenced by an actor's gaze direction when anticipating how an observed action will continue in the immediate future. Participants observed a head rotate towards them, while the gaze direction was either leading, or lagging behind, rotation. They also observed identical rotations of a cylinder containing the geometrical equivalent of the gaze manipulation. The control group was influenced by the gaze manipulations for the animate but not the inanimate stimulus. The ASD group did not discriminate between the stimuli, showing a similar influence for both. This suggests that the ASD responses in the animate condition were biased by the low-level directional features of the eyes rather than by the conveyed intentions.
Anticipation of action intentions in autism spectrum disorder
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2012
We investigated whether individuals with a mild form of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are influenced by an actor’s gaze direction when anticipating how an observed action will continue in the immediate future. Participants observed a head rotate towards them, while the gaze direction was either leading, or lagging behind, rotation. They also observed identical rotations of a cylinder containing the geometrical equivalent of the gaze manipulation. The control group was influenced by the gaze manipulations for the animate but not the inanimate stimulus. The ASD group did not discriminate between the stimuli, showing a similar influence for both. This suggests that the ASD responses in the animate condition were biased by the low-level directional features of the eyes rather than by the conveyed intentions.
It has been hypothesized that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (hereafter ‘autism’) have problems perceiving biological motion, which contributes to their social difficulties. However, the ability to perceive the kinematic profile characteristic of biological motion has not been systematically examined in autism. To examine this basic perceptual ability we conducted two experiments comparing adults with autism with matched typical adults. In Experiment 1, participants indicated whether two movements – which differed in the quantity of formula-generated biological motion – were the same or different. In Experiment 2, they judged which of two movements was ‘less natural’, where the stimuli varied in the degree to which they were a product of real movement data produced by autistic and typical models. There were no group differences in perceptual sensitivity in either experiment, with null effects supported by Bayesian analyses. The findings from these two experiments demonstrate that adults with autism are sensitive to the kinematic information defining biological motion to a typical degree – they are both able to detect the perceptual information in a same-different judgment, and as inclined to categorize biological motion derived from real models as natural. These findings therefore provide evidence against the hypothesis that individuals with autism exhibit low-level difficulties in perceiving the kinematics of others’ actions, suggesting that atypicalities arise either when integrating this kinematic information with other perceptual input, or in the interpretation of kinematic information.
Intact and impaired mechanisms of action understanding in autism
Developmental Psychology, 2011
Typically developing children understand and predict others' behavior by extracting and processing relevant information such as the logic of their actions within the situational constraints and the intentions conveyed by their gaze direction and emotional expressions. Children with autism have difficulties understanding and predicting others' actions. With the use of eye tracking and behavioral measures, we investigated action understanding mechanisms used by 18 children with autism and a well-matched group of 18 typically developing children. Results showed that children with autism (a) consider situational constraints in order to understand the logic of an agent's action and (b) show typical usage of the agent's emotional expressions to infer his or her intentions. We found (c) subtle atypicalities in the way children with autism respond to an agent's direct gaze and (d) marked impairments in their ability to attend to and interpret referential cues such as a head turn for understanding an agent's intentions.
Development and Psychopathology, 2010
Recently, a series of studies demonstrated false belief understanding in young children through completely non-verbal measures. These studies have revealed that children younger than 3 years of age, who consistently fail the standard verbal false belief test, can anticipate others' actions based on their attributed false beliefs. The current study examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who are known to have difficulties in the verbal false belief test, may also show such action anticipation in a non-verbal false belief test. We presented video stimuli of an actor watching an object being hidden in a box. The object was then displaced while the actor was looking away. We recorded children's eye movements and coded whether they spontaneously anticipated the actor's subsequent behaviour, which could only have been predicted if they had attributed a false belief to her. Although typically developing children correctly anticipated the action, children with ASD failed to show such action anticipation. The results suggest that children with ASD have an impairment in false belief attribution, which is independent of their verbal ability.