Abstract
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by problems with social-communication, restricted interests and repetitive behavior. A recent and thought-provoking article presented a normative explanation for the perceptual symptoms of autism in terms of a failure of Bayesian inference (Pellicano and Burr, 2012). In response, we suggested that when Bayesian inference is grounded in its neural instantiation—namely, predictive coding—many features of autistic perception can be attributed to aberrant precision (or beliefs about precision) within the context of hierarchical message passing in the brain (Friston et al., 2013). Here, we unpack the aberrant precision account of autism. Specifically, we consider how empirical findings—that speak directly or indirectly to neurobiological mechanisms—are consistent with the aberrant encoding of precision in autism; in particular, an imbalance of the precision ascribed to sensory evidence relative to prior beliefs.
Highlights
An aberrant precision account of autismA recent and thoughtprovoking article presented a normative explanation for the perceptual symptoms of autism in terms of a failure of Bayesian inference (Pellicano and Burr, 2012)
The challenge of inferring the causes of our sensory inputs— arguably the goal of successful perception—is twofold
From the functional perspective, a decrease in prior precision results in the same posterior expectations as an increase in sensory precision; we have focused on the neurobiological mechanisms, suggesting that high sensory precision may arise as a failure to attenuate sensory precision and thereby contextualize sensory evidence in relation to prior beliefs
Summary
A recent and thoughtprovoking article presented a normative explanation for the perceptual symptoms of autism in terms of a failure of Bayesian inference (Pellicano and Burr, 2012). We suggested that when Bayesian inference is grounded in its neural instantiation—namely, predictive coding—many features of autistic perception can be attributed to aberrant precision (or beliefs about precision) within the context of hierarchical message passing in the brain (Friston et al, 2013). We unpack the aberrant precision account of autism. We consider how empirical findings—that speak directly or indirectly to neurobiological mechanisms—are consistent with the aberrant encoding of precision in autism; in particular, an imbalance of the precision ascribed to sensory evidence relative to prior beliefs
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