Aberrant causal inference and presence of a compensatory mechanism in Autism Spectrum Disorder
Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a panoply of social, communicative, and sensory anomalies. As such, a central goal of computational psychiatry is to ascribe the heterogenous phenotypes observed in ASD to a limited set of canonical computations that may have gone awry in the disorder. Here, we posit causal inference - the process of inferring a causal structure linking sensory signals to hidden world causes - as one such computation. We show that audio-visual integration is intact in ASD and in line with optimal models of cue combination, yet multisensory behavior is anomalous in ASD because this group operates under an internal model favoring integration (vs. segregation). Paradoxically, during explicit reports of common cause across spatial or temporal disparities, individuals with ASD were less and not more likely to report common cause, particularly at small cue disparities. Formal model fitting revealed differences in both the prior probability for common cause (p-common) and choice biases, which are dissociable in implicit but not explicit causal inference tasks. Together, this pattern of results suggests (i) different internal models in attributing world causes to sensory signals in ASD relative to neurotypical individuals given identical sensory cues, and (ii) the presence of an explicit compensatory mechanism in ASD, with these individuals putatively having learned to compensate for their bias to integrate in explicit reports.
Data availability
Data and code are available at https://osf.io/6xbzt.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (NIH U19NS118246)
- Dora E Angelaki
National Institutes of Health (NIH U19NS118246)
- Ralf M Haefner
Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (396921)
- Dora E Angelaki
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the Baylor College of Medicine (protocol number H-29411) and written consent/assent was obtained.
Copyright
© 2022, Noel et al.
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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