Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Languages and Literatures, Communication, Education and Society, University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain.
Proc Biol Sci. 2019 Aug 14;286(1908):20191319. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2019.1319.
Bayesian accounts of autism suggest that this disorder may be rooted in an impaired ability to estimate the probability of future events, possibly owing to reduced priors. Here, we tested this hypothesis within the action domain in children with and without autism using a behavioural paradigm comprising a familiarization and a testing phase. During familiarization, children observed videos depicting a child model performing actions in diverse contexts. Crucially, within this phase, we implicitly biased action-context associations in terms of their probability of co-occurrence. During testing, children observed the same videos but drastically shortened (i.e. reduced amount of kinematics information) and were asked to infer action unfolding. Since during the testing phase movement kinematics became ambiguous, we expected children's responses to be biased to contextual priors, thus compensating for perceptual uncertainty. While this probabilistic effect was present in controls, no such modulation was observed in autistic children, overall suggesting an impairment in using contextual priors when predicting other peoples' actions in uncertain environments.
贝叶斯自闭症解释表明，这种障碍可能源于对未来事件概率的估计能力受损，可能是由于先验概率降低所致。在这里，我们在自闭症儿童和正常儿童的行为领域中测试了这一假设，使用了一个包含熟悉和测试阶段的行为范式。在熟悉阶段，儿童观看视频，视频中描绘了一个儿童模型在不同环境中执行动作。至关重要的是，在这个阶段，我们以动作-环境关联的共现概率为基础对其进行了隐含的偏向。在测试阶段，儿童观看相同的视频，但视频被大幅缩短（即减少了运动学信息），并被要求推断动作展开。由于在测试阶段运动学变得模糊，我们预计儿童的反应会偏向于环境先验，从而补偿感知不确定性。虽然这种概率效应在对照组中存在，但在自闭症儿童中没有观察到这种调节，这总体表明，在不确定的环境中预测他人行为时，他们使用环境先验的能力受损。
