Social behavioural adaptation in Autism.

Baudouin Forgeot D'Arc,Marie Devaine,Jean Daunizeau,Michael Moutoussis

doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007700

Abstract

Autism is still diagnosed on the basis of subjective assessments of elusive notions such as interpersonal contact and social reciprocity. We propose to decompose reciprocal social interactions in their basic computational constituents. Specifically, we test the assumption that autistic individuals disregard information regarding the stakes of social interactions when adapting to others. We compared 24 adult autistic participants to 24 neurotypical (NT) participants engaging in a repeated dyadic competitive game against artificial agents with calibrated reciprocal adaptation capabilities. Critically, participants were framed to believe either that they were competing against somebody else or that they were playing a gambling game. Only the NT participants did alter their adaptation strategy when they held information regarding others' competitive incentives, in which case they outperformed the AS group. Computational analyses of trial-by-trial choice sequences show that the behavioural repertoire of autistic people exhibits subnormal flexibility and mentalizing sophistication, especially when information regarding opponents' incentives was available. These two computational phenotypes yield 79% diagnosis classification accuracy and explain 62% of the severity of social symptoms in autistic participants. Such computational decomposition of the autistic social phenotype may prove relevant for drawing novel diagnostic boundaries and guiding individualized clinical interventions in autism.

Highlights

Our working hypothesis is that social reciprocity deficits in people with AS derive from a basic inability to tune one’s adaptation strategy to contextual knowledge about the stakes of social interactions
We ask participants to engage in simple interactive games with AI agents that are endowed with calibrated reciprocal adaptation capabilities
Autism spectrum (AS, or ASD in DSM-5- American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Kenny et al, 2016) is a highly heterogeneous condition defined by altered reciprocal social interaction and inflexible patterns of behavior

Summary

Introduction

Autism spectrum (AS, or ASD in DSM-5- American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Kenny et al, 2016) is a highly heterogeneous condition defined by altered reciprocal social interaction and inflexible patterns of behavior. ToM impairments have been repeatedly evidenced in autistic children using tests of, e.g., false belief understanding [13,14,15], sarcasm/irony detection [16,17] or moral evaluation [18,19] These tests yield quite unreliable results and have poor psychometric properties in older individuals [20], including ceiling effects in adolescents and adults [21,22]. This is why, theoretically relevant to autism, quantitative tests of ToM has had only limited impact on diagnosis or intervention to date [23]

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Discussion

Conclusion