1. Acquisition and Use of ‘Priors’ in Autism: Typical in Deciding Where to Look, Atypical in Deciding What Is There
- Author
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Laura A. Theisinger, Peter Falkai, Christine M. Falter-Wagner, Zhuanghua Shi, Rasmus L. Pistorius, Nikolaos Koutsouleris, Hermann J. Müller, and Fredrik Allenmark
- Subjects
Predictive coding ,Autism Spectrum Disorder ,media_common.quotation_subject ,050105 experimental psychology ,Task (project management) ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Perception ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,medicine ,Reaction Time ,Relevance (law) ,Humans ,Learning ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Attention ,Autistic Disorder ,Visual attention ,media_common ,Visual search ,Original Paper ,05 social sciences ,medicine.disease ,Identification (information) ,Surprise ,Knowledge ,Autism spectrum disorder ,Autism ,Psychology ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Cognitive psychology - Abstract
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are thought to under-rely on prior knowledge in perceptual decision-making. This study examined whether this applies to decisions of attention allocation, of relevance for ‘predictive-coding’ accounts of ASD. In a visual search task, a salient but task-irrelevant distractor appeared with higher probability in one display half. Individuals with ASD learned to avoid ‘attentional capture’ by distractors in the probable region as effectively as control participants—indicating typical priors for deploying attention. However, capture by a ‘surprising’ distractor at an unlikely location led to greatly slowed identification of a subsequent target at that location—indicating that individuals with ASD attempt to control surprise (unexpected attentional capture) by over-regulating parameters in post-selective decision-making. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10803-020-04828-2.
- Published
- 2020