In 2014, researchers proposed a new hypothesis about the nature of autism. This hypothesis posits that the common traits of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are manifestations of an individual’s difficulty in making predictions about cause and effect. For an individual with compromised prediction skills, the world is seemingly a “magical” place where events occur unexpectedly and without reason. This unpredictable environment proves overwhelming and comprises the individual’s ability to interact with it.
The proposal, along with several related conceptualizations, has spurred several targeted empirical investigations of predictive processes in autism. In this lecture, Pawan Sinha and Dagmar Sternad reviewed some of the data accumulated so far.
Sinha considered both positive and negative findings and described efforts to test the proposal further. His lab has focused their studies on three domains: sensory habituation, motor control and high-level cognition. In each of these domains, the experiments probed whether the performance of individuals with autism is affected in a manner consistent with difficulty in prediction. The picture that has emerged has provided support for the hypothesis, although not unequivocally so.
Sternad reviewed her group’s experimental work examining the action of catching a ball in realistic and virtual environments. The scenario requires both the prediction of the ball’s path and the internal prediction needed to successfully complete the catching motion. A series of experiments that titrate the degree of prediction has yielded results consistent with the hypothesis: kinematic data and muscle activation reveal selective impairments in ASD for actions where prediction is dominant. Control tasks without predictive elements, such as reaction time and postural balance, do not show differences.
