Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802, Munich, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2021 Oct;51(10):3744-3758. doi: 10.1007/s10803-020-04828-2. Epub 2020 Dec 29.
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are thought to under-rely on prior knowledge in perceptual decision-making. This study examined whether this applies to decisions of attention allocation, of relevance for 'predictive-coding' accounts of ASD. In a visual search task, a salient but task-irrelevant distractor appeared with higher probability in one display half. Individuals with ASD learned to avoid 'attentional capture' by distractors in the probable region as effectively as control participants-indicating typical priors for deploying attention. However, capture by a 'surprising' distractor at an unlikely location led to greatly slowed identification of a subsequent target at that location-indicating that individuals with ASD attempt to control surprise (unexpected attentional capture) by over-regulating parameters in post-selective decision-making.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者在知觉决策中被认为较少依赖先前知识。本研究考察了这是否适用于注意力分配的决策，这与 ASD 的“预测编码”解释有关。在视觉搜索任务中，一个显著但与任务无关的分心物以更高的概率出现在一个显示半区。自闭症患者像对照组一样有效地学会了避免在可能区域中被分心物“注意捕获”——这表明他们对注意力的分配有典型的先验。然而，在不太可能的位置出现一个“意外”的分心物会导致对随后在该位置的目标的识别大大减慢——这表明 ASD 患者试图通过在后选择决策中过度调节参数来控制惊讶（意外的注意力捕获）。
