title: Reduced sensitivity to social priors during action prediction in adults with autism spectrum disorders.
abstract: An extensive amount of evidence has documented a diminished ability to predict and understand other people's action in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Recently, two theoretical accounts, the "Hypo-priors" and the "Aberrant precision" hypotheses, have suggested that attenuated Bayesian priors or an imbalance of the precision ascribed to sensory evidence relative to prior expectations may be responsible for the atypical perceptual experience and difficulties with action understanding in ASD. In the present study, we aimed to directly investigate whether difficulties in the appreciation of others' intentions can be accounted for by abnormal interaction between these two types of information: (i) the sensory evidence conveyed by movement kinematics, and (ii) the observer's expectations, acquired from past experience or derived from prior knowledge. To test this hypothesis, we contrasted the ability to infer Non-Social and Social intentions in adults with and without ASD, using a series of tasks in which both sensory evidence and prior expectations were manipulated. The results showed that attenuated effect of prior expectations in ASD individuals does not result from a generalized impairment in mentalizing, but one confined to social intentions. Attenuated priors in the social domain predicted the severity of clinical symptoms in the area of social interaction. Importantly, however, we found that reduced priors in the social domain could be compensated by ASD through observational learning, i.e. through deriving statistical regularities from observed behaviours. This capacity to balance reduced social expectations by learning inversely correlated with the severity of repetitive and stereotyped behaviours. Collectively, these findings suggest that adults with ASD exhibit a disturbance in the inferential mechanism that integrates sensory evidence into prior beliefs to produce accurate inferences about other people's intentions.
authors.affiliation: Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS UMR 8129, Institut d'Etude de la Cognition, École Normale Supérieure & PSL Research University, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France; Department of Neuroscience, Biotech Campus - University of Geneva, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland. Electronic address: valerian.chambon@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Valerian
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Chambon
authors.affiliation: Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, Université de Toulouse, UPS-CNRS, Place du Docteur Baylac, Pavillon Baudot, 31059 Toulouse, France.
authors.forename: Chlöé
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Farrer
authors.affiliation: Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS UMR 8129, Institut d'Etude de la Cognition, École Normale Supérieure & PSL Research University, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Elisabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pacherie
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS UMR 8242, Université Paris-Descartes, 45, rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Pierre O
authors.initials: PO
authors.lastname: Jacquet
authors.affiliation: INSERM U955, IMRB, University Paris Est Creteil, AP-HP, Henri Mondor-Albert Chenevier Hospitals, Department of Psychiatry, Fondation FondaMental, French National Science Foundation, 40 rue de Mesly, 94000 Créteil, France.
authors.forename: Marion
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Leboyer
authors.affiliation: Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS UMR 8129, Institut d'Etude de la Cognition, École Normale Supérieure & PSL Research University, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France. Electronic address: tiziana.zalla@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Tiziana
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zalla
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000067877:Autism Spectrum Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D012919:Social Behavior; D012938:Social Perception; D056345:Theory of Mind
keywords: Action prediction; Autism spectrum disorders; Bayesian inference; Mentalizing; Prior knowledge; Sensory evidence