Normal binocular rivalry in autism: implications for the excitation/inhibition imbalance hypothesis.
Normal binocular rivalry in autism: implications for the excitation/inhibition imbalance hypothesis.
复制标题
自闭症患者的正常双眼竞争：对兴奋/抑制失衡假说的影响。
DOI：
10.1016/j.visres.2012.11.002
复制
发表时间：
2013
期刊：
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Heeger,DavidJ
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Said,ChristopherP;Egan,RyanD;Minshew,NancyJ;Behrmann,Marlene;Heeger,DavidJ
自闭症的特点是在感知、情感、语言和社会认知等多个维度上出现紊乱。对于潜在的神经生理学基础，已经提出了许多假设。其中包括兴奋/抑制（E/I）失衡假说，该假说认为自闭症患者的皮层兴奋和抑制水平受到破坏。我们在视觉系统中测试了这一理论，因为视觉是神经科学中被更好理解的系统之一，也因为E/I失衡理论被用来解释自闭症患者对感觉刺激的超敏反应。我们对双目竞争进行了两个实验，双目竞争是一种被充分研究的心理物理现象，主要取决于皮层的兴奋和抑制水平。利用计算模型，我们具体预测了在双眼竞争的混合知觉（实验1）和行波知觉（实验2）两个方面，兴奋和抑制水平的不平衡如何影响知觉。我们发现，在高功能自闭症患者和对照组之间，这些现象都没有显著差异，也没有证据表明这些测量结果与自闭症的严重程度之间存在关系。这些结果并不能完全排除自闭症患者视觉系统中存在兴奋/抑制不平衡的可能性，但它们表明，如果存在这种不平衡，其幅度可能很小。
Autism is characterized by disruption in multiple dimensions of perception, emotion, language and social cognition. Many hypotheses for the underlying neurophysiological basis have been proposed. Among these is the excitation/inhibition (E/I) imbalance hypothesis, which states that levels of cortical excitation and inhibition are disrupted in autism. We tested this theory in the visual system, because vision is one of the better understood systems in neuroscience, and because the E/I imbalance theory has been proposed to explain hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli in autism. We conducted two experiments on binocular rivalry, a well-studied psychophysical phenomenon that depends critically on excitation and inhibition levels in cortex. Using a computational model, we made specific predictions about how imbalances in excitation and inhibition levels would affect perception during two aspects of binocular rivalry: mixed perception (Experiment 1) and traveling waves (Experiment 2). We found no significant differences in either of these phenomena between high-functioning adults with autism and controls, and no evidence for a relationship between these measurements and the severity of autism. These results do not conclusively rule out an excitation/inhibition imbalance in the visual system of those with autism, but they suggest that such an imbalance, if it exists, is likely to be small in magnitude.