Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2020 Aug;129(6):612-623. doi: 10.1037/abn0000518.
Predictive processing accounts of autism posit that individuals with autism rely less on expectations than those without autism when it comes to interpreting incoming sensory information. Since these expectations are claimed to underlie all information processing, we reason that any differences in how they are formed or adjusted should be persistent across multiple cognitive domains and detectable much earlier than clinicians can currently diagnose autism, around 3 years of age. This experiment is part of a longitudinal prospective study of young children with increased familial likelihood of autism. Around 20% of these children will receive an autism diagnosis, compared to 1% of the general population. The current electroencephalography study used an adaptation paradigm to investigate whether a reduced effect of expectations is already present in high-likelihood 2-year-olds, before autism can reliably be diagnosed. While we did not observe the adaptation aftereffect we expected, high-likelihood children habituated more than low-likelihood children, and the two groups did not differ in their overall responses to the manipulation, contrary to our hypotheses and previous findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
自闭症的预测加工理论认为，在解释传入的感觉信息时，自闭症个体比非自闭症个体更少依赖于预期。由于这些预期被认为是所有信息处理的基础，我们推断，它们的形成或调整方式的任何差异都应该在多个认知领域中持续存在，并且比临床医生目前能够诊断自闭症的时间（大约 3 岁）更早被检测到。本实验是对具有自闭症家族易感性的幼儿进行的纵向前瞻性研究的一部分。这些儿童中约有 20%会被诊断出患有自闭症，而普通人群中只有 1%。目前的脑电图研究使用了一种适应范式来调查在自闭症能够可靠诊断之前，高风险的 2 岁儿童是否已经存在预期效应降低的情况。虽然我们没有观察到预期的适应后效，但高风险儿童比低风险儿童更容易习惯化，而且这两组儿童对操作的总体反应没有差异，这与我们的假设和先前的发现相反。
