Abstract
Beyond the symptoms which characterize their diagnoses, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced performance in simple perceptual discrimination tasks. Often attributed to superior sensory sensitivities, enhanced performance may also reflect a weaker bias towards previously perceived stimuli. This study probes perceptual inference in a group of individuals who have lost the autism diagnosis (LAD); that is, they were diagnosed with ASD in early childhood but have no current ASD symptoms. Groups of LAD, current ASD, and typically developing (TD) participants completed an auditory discrimination task. Individuals with TD showed a bias towards previously perceived stimuli—a perceptual process called “contraction bias”; that is, their representation of a given tone was contracted towards the preceding trial stimulus in a manner that is Bayesian optimal. Similarly, individuals in the LAD group showed a contraction bias. In contrast, individuals with current ASD showed a weaker contraction bias, suggesting reduced perceptual inferencing. These findings suggest that changes that characterize LAD extend beyond the social and communicative symptoms of ASD, impacting perceptual domains. Measuring perceptual processing earlier in development in ASD will tap the causality between changes in perceptual and symptomatological domains. Further, the characterization of perceptual inference could reveal meaningful individual differences in complex high-level behaviors.
Highlights
Beyond the symptoms which characterize their diagnoses, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced performance in simple perceptual discrimination tasks
Growing literature has documented many aspects of the loss of autism diagnosis (LAD; formerly, “optimal outcome”) phenomenon, in which lost the autism diagnosis (LAD) individuals are largely indistinguishable from their typically developing (TD) peers, with both groups differing from individuals who remain on the spectrum
Beyond improvements in communication and social skills, results of the current study suggest that children with a “loss of ASD diagnosis” (LAD) display typical perceptual inference skills, unlike their peers with ASD
Summary
Beyond the symptoms which characterize their diagnoses, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced performance in simple perceptual discrimination tasks. Individuals with current ASD showed a weaker contraction bias, suggesting reduced perceptual inferencing These findings suggest that changes that characterize LAD extend beyond the social and communicative symptoms of ASD, impacting perceptual domains. Studies have examined behavior using standardized clinical assessments of social and communication s kills[11], restricted and repetitive behaviors[12], psychiatric comorbidities[13], language and verbal memory[14], executive functions[15], and academic skills[16] Across each of these studies, participants in the LAD group scored in the average range or higher, with performance similar to (or higher than) that of the TD group. In the absence of longitudinal data, it is not certain that individuals with the LAD outcome originally displayed perceptual strengths
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