Department of Sport and Health Sciences, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, St Luke's Campus, Heavitree Road, Exeter, EX1 2LU, Devon, UK.
Centre for Applied Autism Research, Department of Psychology, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK.
Sci Rep. 2021 Oct 13;11(1):20377. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-99864-y.
The integration of prior expectations, sensory information, and environmental volatility is proposed to be atypical in Autism Spectrum Disorder, yet few studies have tested these predictive processes in active movement tasks. To address this gap in the research, we used an immersive virtual-reality racquetball paradigm to explore how visual sampling behaviours and movement kinematics are adjusted in relation to unexpected, uncertain, and volatile changes in environmental statistics. We found that prior expectations concerning ball 'bounciness' affected sensorimotor control in both autistic and neurotypical participants, with all individuals using prediction-driven gaze strategies to track the virtual ball. However, autistic participants showed substantial differences in visuomotor behaviour when environmental conditions were more volatile. Specifically, uncertainty-related performance difficulties in these conditions were accompanied by atypical movement kinematics and visual sampling responses. Results support proposals that autistic people overestimate the volatility of sensory environments, and suggest that context-sensitive differences in active inference could explain a range of movement-related difficulties in autism.
先前的预期、感官信息和环境波动性的整合被认为在自闭症谱系障碍中是不典型的，但很少有研究在主动运动任务中测试这些预测过程。为了解决研究中的这一空白，我们使用沉浸式虚拟现实壁球范式来探索视觉采样行为和运动动力学如何根据环境统计数据的意外、不确定和不稳定变化进行调整。我们发现，关于球“弹性”的先前预期会影响自闭症和神经典型参与者的运动控制，所有参与者都使用预测驱动的注视策略来跟踪虚拟球。然而，当环境条件更加不稳定时，自闭症患者的视觉运动行为表现出显著差异。具体来说，在这些条件下，与不确定性相关的表现困难伴随着异常的运动动力学和视觉采样反应。研究结果支持了自闭症患者高估感官环境波动性的观点，并表明主动推理中与上下文相关的差异可以解释自闭症患者一系列与运动相关的困难。
