Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Nobels väg 9, 171 65 Solna, Stockholm, Sweden.
Centre for Psychiatry Research, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, & Stockholm Health Care Services, Region Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden.
Mol Autism. 2020 Sep 22;11(1):71. doi: 10.1186/s13229-020-00375-w.
Recent theories have linked autism to challenges in prediction learning and social cognition. It is unknown, however, how autism affects learning about threats from others "demonstrators" through observation, which contains predictive learning based on social information. The aims of this study are therefore to investigate social fear learning in individual with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and to examine whether typically developing social cognition is necessary for successful observational learning.
Adults with ASD (n = 23) and neurotypical controls (n = 25) completed a social fear learning (SFL) procedure in which participants watched a "demonstrator" receiving electrical shocks in conjunction with a previously neutral conditioned stimulus (CS+), but never with a safe control stimulus (CS-). Skin conductance was used to measure autonomic responses of learned threat responses to the CS+ versus CS-. Visual attention was measured during learning using eye tracking. To establish a non-social learning baseline, each participant also underwent a test of Pavlovian conditioning.
During learning, individuals with ASD attended less to the demonstrator's face, and when later tested, displayed stronger observational, but not Pavlovian, autonomic indices of learning (skin conductance) compared to controls. In controls, both higher levels of attention to the demonstrator's face and trait empathy predicted diminished expressions of learning during test.
The relatively small sample size of this study and the typical IQ range of the ASD group limit the generalizability of our findings to individuals with ASD in the average intellectual ability range.
The enhanced social threat learning in individuals with ASD may be linked to difficulties using visual attention and mental state attributions to downregulate their emotion.
最近的理论将自闭症与预测学习和社会认知方面的挑战联系起来。然而，自闭症如何通过观察影响对来自他人“示范者”的威胁的学习尚不清楚，这种观察包含基于社会信息的预测学习。因此，本研究旨在调查自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）个体的社会恐惧学习，并检验典型的社会认知是否对于成功的观察学习是必要的。
成年 ASD 患者（n = 23）和神经典型对照组（n = 25）完成了社会恐惧学习（SFL）程序，在该程序中，参与者观察到一名“示范者”在与先前中性条件刺激（CS+）一起接受电击，但从未与安全对照刺激（CS-）一起接受电击。使用皮肤电导测量自主反应，以测量对 CS+与 CS-的学习威胁反应。在学习过程中使用眼动追踪测量视觉注意力。为了建立非社会性学习基线，每个参与者还接受了巴甫洛夫条件反射测试。
在学习过程中，ASD 个体对示范者的面部关注度较低，而在稍后的测试中，与对照组相比，他们表现出更强的观察性但不是巴甫洛夫式的自主学习指标（皮肤电导）。在对照组中，对示范者面部的关注度越高，以及特质同理心越高，预测在测试中表现出的学习程度越低。
本研究的样本量相对较小，以及 ASD 组的典型智商范围限制了我们的发现对平均智力范围内的 ASD 个体的普遍性。
ASD 个体增强的社会威胁学习可能与他们使用视觉注意力和心理状态归因来调节情绪的困难有关。
