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

自闭症是一种复杂的发育状况，最为人所知的是它影响一个人与他人互动和交流的方式。但自闭症也会以其他重要的、同样令人衰弱的方式影响个体的行为，比如强迫性地希望一切都保持不变——比如每天走完全相同的路线去上学——或者在感觉上工作得太好了——比如讨厌荧光灯——或者不够好——比如被旋转的物体吸引。在这项研究中，我们认为自闭症患者的各种行为可能是由自闭症患者感知和解释周围世界的方式的根本差异引起的。对所有人来说，关于世界的知识都是通过我们的感官获得的。为了快速有效地处理这些信息，大脑必须不断地“调整”它的灵敏度，以适应环境中的变化。当一个人在夜间醒来打开灯时，起初很难看清什么，直到眼睛的感受器逐渐适应了新的环境。这种轻微的“适应”确实是了不起的。它说明了大脑如何不断灵活地“适应”外部世界的变化。这个提议提出，如果这些适应过程被破坏，世界将会是什么样子，以及它可能会如何被解释？具体来说，它询问大脑适应过程的不灵活是否可能是自闭症的重要组成部分。在这个项目中，我们将使用创新的实验技术来比较自闭症儿童和正常发育儿童的感知功能。我们将看到自闭症儿童的感知体验是否比非自闭症儿童更缺乏“适应性”。我们还想知道这些差异是否普遍存在于整个大脑中，或者它们是否仅针对处理某些类型的感觉信息。此外，我们将使用强大的新形式的计算机建模，这很少被应用于自闭症的研究，但它可以极大地帮助精确地确定自闭症中哪些心理过程可能不同。我们假设自闭症儿童的适应能力可能较差，因为他们过于依赖“此时此地”的感觉，而不是使用先前的知识——他们通过经验积累的知识——来塑造和理解环境中的东西。自闭症患者感知世界是“真实”的可能性，而不是被先前的经验灌输的可能性，这是一个重要的新见解：它不仅有助于解释自闭症患者体验世界的方式的差异，而且还可能解释自闭症的一些标志性特征，特别是感官敏感性和他们处理新情况和新经历的困难。如果得到证实，我们的建议将提供一种思考和研究自闭症的新方法，能够在干预措施中发挥关键作用，旨在使自闭症患者能够较少痛苦地感知和体验周围的世界。

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.