"I do not see the world as others do." Diminished perceptual adaptation, hypo-priors and autism.

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Autism is a complex developmental condition, most well known for the way that it affects how a person interacts and communicates with others. But autism can affect an individual's behaviour in other important and equally debilitating ways, such as in an obsessive desire for everything to be the same - like taking the exact same route to school every day - and in senses that are working too well - like being averse to florescent light - or not well enough - like being drawn to spinning objects. In this proposal, we suggest that this wide range of autistic behaviours might be caused by fundamental differences in the way that a person with autism perceives and interprets the world around them. For all people, knowledge about the world arrives through our senses. To process this information rapidly and efficiently, the brain must continually "tune" its sensitivity to match what is in the environment. When one wakes during the night and turns on the light, at first, it is difficult to see very much at all until receptors in the eye gradually adjust to the new conditions. Such light "adaptation" is truly remarkable. It illustrates the way in which the brain constantly - and flexibly - "adapts" to changes in the outside world. This proposal asks what the world would look like, and how might be it interpreted, if these adaptation processes were disrupted? Specifically, it asks whether less flexible brain adaptation processes might be part and parcel of autism.In the project, we will compare the perceptual functions of children with autism and typically developing children using innovative experimental techniques. We will see whether the perceptual experiences of children with autism are less "adaptable" than children without autism. We also want to know whether these differences occur generally throughout the brain or whether they might be specific to processing only certain types of sensory information. Furthermore, we will use powerful new forms of computer modelling, which have rarely been applied to the study of autism, but which can be of great assistance in pinpointing precisely which psychological processes might be different in autism. We hypothesise that children with autism might be less adaptable because they rely too heavily on what they sense in the "here and now" rather than using prior knowledge - knowledge that they've accrued with experience - to shape and make sense of what is in the environment. The possibility that people with autism perceive the world as it "really is" rather than as imbued by prior experiences is a critical new insight: not only can it help explain the differences in the way people with autism experience the world but it might also explain some of the hallmark features of autism, especially the sensory sensitivities and their difficulties dealing with new situations and experiences. If confirmed, our suggestion would offer a new way of thinking about, and studying, autism capable of playing a crucial role in interventions aimed at enabling people with autism to perceive and experience the world around them with less distress.