Contextual priors do not modulate action prediction in children with autism
Contextual priors do not modulate action prediction in children with autism
复制标题
DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2019.1319
复制
发表时间：
2019-07-31
影响因子：
4.7
通讯作者：
Urgesi, Cosimo
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Amoruso, Lucia;Narzisi, Antonio;Urgesi, Cosimo
贝叶斯对自闭症的解释表明，这种疾病可能根源于估计未来事件概率的能力受损，这可能是由于先验的减少。在这里，我们使用包括熟悉和测试阶段的行为范式在患有和非自闭症儿童的行动领域测试了这一假设。在熟悉过程中，孩子们观看了描绘儿童模型在不同环境中执行动作的视频。至关重要的是，在这个阶段，我们隐含地在动作与上下文关联的共现概率方面存在偏见。在测试过程中，孩子们观看了相同的视频，但大大缩短了（即运动学信息量减少），并被要求推断动作的展开。由于在测试阶段运动运动学变得模糊，我们预计儿童的反应会偏向于背景先验，从而补偿感知的不确定性。虽然这种概率效应存在于对照组中，但在自闭症儿童中没有观察到这种调节，总体而言表明在不确定环境中预测他人行为时使用情境先验的能力受到损害。
Bayesian accounts o f autism suggest that this disorder may be rooted in an impaired ability to estimate the probability of future events, possibly owing to reduced priors. Here, we tested this hypothesis within the action domain in children with and without autism using a behavioural paradigm comprising a familiarisation and a testing phase. During familiarisation, children observed videos depicting a child model performing actions in diverse contexts. Crucially, within this phase, we implicitly biased action-context associations in terms of their probability of co-occurrence. During testing, children observed the same videos but drastically shortened (i.e. reduced amount of kinematics information) and were asked to infer action unfolding. Since during the testing phase movement kinematics became ambiguous, We expected children's responses to be biased to contextual priors, thus compensating for perceptual uncertainty. While this probabilistic effect was present in controls, no such modulation was observed in autistic children, overall suggesting an impairment in using contextual priors when predicting other peoples' actions in uncertain environments.