Hellendoorn Annika, Wijnroks Lex, Leseman Paul P M
Department of Special Education, Centre for Cognitive and Motor Disabilities, Utrecht University , Utrecht, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2015 Mar 30;6:359. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00359. eCollection 2015.
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.
在本文中，我们假设自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）个体天生在不变性检测方面存在缺陷，不变性检测是一种学习过程，通过该过程人和动物开始关注变化的刺激阵列中相对稳定的模式或结构规律。本文综合了大量研究，这些研究表明，ASD中不变性检测这一领域通用的感知学习过程存在缺陷，会在不同发育领域引发一系列后果。我们将概述不变性检测方面的这种缺陷如何导致ASD个体产生不确定性、不可预测性和缺乏控制感，以及该学习过程中不同程度的损伤如何解释ASD表型的异质性。我们还描述了ASD中神经可塑性的差异如何构成感知学习损伤的基础。本观点为先前的理论提供了一种替代方案，并有助于应对理解导致各种自闭症行为的发育轨迹这一挑战。
