Predictive Sensorimotor Control in Autism
Arthur, T; Vine, S; Brosnan, M; et al.Buckingham, G
Date: 25 September 2020
Journal
Brain
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP) / Guarantors of Brain
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder has been characterised by atypicalities in how predictions and
sensory information are processed in the brain. To shed light on this relationship in the context
of sensorimotor control we assessed prediction-related measures of cognition, perception, gaze
and motor functioning in a large general population ...
Autism Spectrum Disorder has been characterised by atypicalities in how predictions and
sensory information are processed in the brain. To shed light on this relationship in the context
of sensorimotor control we assessed prediction-related measures of cognition, perception, gaze
and motor functioning in a large general population (n = 92; experiment one) and in clinicallydiagnosed autistic people (n = 29; experiment two). In both these experiments perception and
action were strongly driven by prior expectations of object weight, with large items typically
predicted to weigh more than equally-weighted smaller ones. Interestingly, these predictive
action models were employed comparably at a sensorimotor level in both autistic and
neurotypical individuals with varying levels of autistic-like traits. Specifically, initial fingertip
force profiles and resulting action kinematics were both scaled according to participants’ prelift heaviness estimates, and generic visual sampling behaviours were notably consistent across
groups. These results suggest that the weighting of prior information is not chronically
underweighted in autism, as proposed by simple Bayesian accounts of the disorder. Instead,
our results cautiously implicate context-sensitive processing mechanisms, such as precision
modulation and hierarchical volatility inference. Together, these findings present novel
implications for both future scientific investigations and the applied autism community.
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