Acquisition and Use of 'Priors' in Autism: Typical in Deciding Where to Look, Atypical in Deciding What Is There

Allenmark, Fredrik ; Shi, Zhuanghua; Pistorius, Rasmus L.; Theisinger, Laura A.; Koutsouleris, Nikolaos; Falkai, Peter ; Müller, Hermann J. und Falter-Wagner, Christine M. (2021): Acquisition and Use of 'Priors' in Autism: Typical in Deciding Where to Look, Atypical in Deciding What Is There. In: Journal of autism and developmental disorders, Bd. 51: S. 3744-3758

Abstract

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.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Publikationsform: Publisher's Version
• Fakultät: Psychologie und Pädagogik > Department Psychologie
• Themengebiete: 100 Philosophie und Psychologie > 150 Psychologie
• Sprache: Englisch