Perception in autism does not adhere to Weber's law
- University of Haifa, Israel
Abstract
Perceptual atypicalities are a widely acknowledged but poorly understood feature of autism. We demonstrate here a striking violation of one of the most adaptive psychophysical computations - Weber's law - in high-functioning individuals with autism. JNDs based on the best-fitting psychometric functions were measured for size visual judgments (Exp. 1), weight haptic discrimination (Exp. 2), and illusive perception of weight (brightness-weight illusion; Exp. 3). Results for the typically developed group confirmed Weber's law, demonstrating a linear increase in JNDs with intensity, resulting in constant fractions across intensities. The results for the ASD, in contrast, showed no scaling of JNDs with intensity; instead, fractions decreased linearly with intensity. In striking contrast to its consistency in typical perception, Weber's law does not hold for visual and haptic perception in autism. These robust modulations in psychophysical computations, demonstrated for different domains of perception, suggest a modality-independent, low-level mechanism driving altered perception in autism.
Data availability
Data can be found in https://osf.io/ckmhq/.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Israel Science Foundation (967/14)
- Bat-Sheva Hadad
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All procedures were approved by the Ethical Committee of the Faculty of Education, University of Haifa (Perceptual Processing in ASD: approval number 016/15). Adults who were students at the University of Haifa received course credit, children received a gift card, and individuals with ASD were paid 50NIS per hour to compensate them for their time.
Copyright
© 2019, Hadad & Schwartz
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Perception in autism does not adhere to Weber's law
eLife 8:e42223.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.42223
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