title: Interpersonal predictive coding, not action perception, is impaired in autism.
abstract: This study was conducted to examine interpersonal predictive coding in individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA). Healthy and HFA participants observed point-light displays of two agents (A and B) performing separate actions. In the 'communicative' condition, the action performed by agent B responded to a communicative gesture performed by agent A. In the 'individual' condition, agent A's communicative action was substituted by a non-communicative action. Using a simultaneous masking-detection task, we demonstrate that observing agent A's communicative gesture enhanced visual discrimination of agent B for healthy controls, but not for participants with HFA. These results were not explained by differences in attentional factors as measured via eye-tracking, or by differences in the recognition of the point-light actions employed. Our findings, therefore, suggest that individuals with HFA are impaired in the use of social information to predict others' actions and provide behavioural evidence that such deficits could be closely related to impairments of predictive coding.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital Cologne, 50937 Cologne, Germany.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: von der Lühe
authors.affiliation: CoBtek Laboratory, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, 06103 Nice, France.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Manera
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Science Department, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Barisic
authors.affiliation: C'MON Cognition Motion and Neuroscience Unit, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Becchio
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital Cologne, 50937 Cologne, Germany Research Centre Juelich, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-3), 52428 Juelich, Germany.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Vogeley
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital Cologne, 50937 Cologne, Germany Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, 80804 Munich, Germany leonhard_schilbach@psych.mpg.de.
authors.forename: L
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5547-8309
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Schilbach
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001321:Autistic Disorder; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: high-functioning autism; intention recognition; predictive coding; social interaction