Cognition & Philosophy Lab, Monash University.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.
Psychol Bull. 2017 May;143(5):521-542. doi: 10.1037/bul0000097. Epub 2017 Mar 23.
Autism spectrum disorder currently lacks an explanation that bridges cognitive, computational, and neural domains. In the past 5 years, progress has been sought in this area by drawing on Bayesian probability theory to describe both social and nonsocial aspects of autism in terms of systematic differences in the processing of sensory information in the brain. The present article begins by synthesizing the existing literature in this regard, including an introduction to the topic for unfamiliar readers. The key proposal is that autism is characterized by a greater weighting of sensory information in updating probabilistic representations of the environment. Here, we unpack further how the hierarchical setting of Bayesian inference in the brain (i.e., predictive processing) adds significant depth to this approach. In particular, autism may relate to finer mechanisms involved in the context-sensitive adjustment of sensory weightings, such as in how neural representations of environmental volatility inform perception. Crucially, in light of recent sensorimotor treatments of predictive processing (i.e., active inference), hypotheses regarding atypical sensory weighting in autism have direct implications for the regulation of action and behavior. Given that core features of autism relate to how the individual interacts with and samples the world around them (e.g., reduced social responding, repetitive behaviors, motor impairments, and atypical visual sampling), the extension of Bayesian theories of autism to action will be critical for yielding insights into this condition. (PsycINFO Database Record
自闭症谱系障碍目前缺乏一个能够将认知、计算和神经领域联系起来的解释。在过去的 5 年中，人们借鉴贝叶斯概率理论来描述自闭症的社会和非社会方面，根据大脑中对感官信息的处理存在系统差异，从而在该领域寻求进展。本文首先综合了这方面的现有文献，包括为不熟悉该主题的读者做介绍。主要观点是，自闭症的特征是对环境概率表示进行更新时，更重视感官信息。在这里，我们进一步阐述了大脑中贝叶斯推理的层次结构（即预测处理）如何为这种方法增添了重要的深度。具体来说，自闭症可能与环境敏感调整感官权重的更精细机制有关，例如环境波动性的神经表示如何影响感知。至关重要的是，鉴于最近对预测处理的感觉运动治疗（即主动推理），自闭症中异常感觉权重的假设对行为和动作的调节有直接影响。鉴于自闭症的核心特征与个体如何与周围世界互动和采样有关（例如，社交反应减少、重复行为、运动障碍和异常视觉采样），将自闭症的贝叶斯理论扩展到行动将对深入了解这种情况至关重要。
