Color Afterimages in Autistic Adults

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Apr 2016

It has been suggested that attenuated adaptation to visual stimuli in autism is the result of atypical perceptual priors (e.g., Pellicano and Burr in Trends Cogn Sci 16(10):504–510, 2012. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009). This study investigated adaptation to color in autistic adults, measuring both strength of afterimage and the influence of top-down knowledge. We found no difference in color afterimage strength between autistic and typical adults. Effects of top-down knowledge on afterimage intensity shown by Lupyan (Acta Psychol 161:117–130, 2015. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.08.006) were not replicated for either group. This study finds intact color adaptation in autistic adults. This is in contrast to findings of attenuated adaptation to faces and numerosity in autistic children. Future research should investigate the possibility of developmental differences in adaptation and further examine top-down effects on adaptation.

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Color Afterimages in Autistic Adults

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders April 2018, Volume 48, Issue 4, pp 1409–1421 | Cite as Color Afterimages in Autistic Adults AuthorsAuthors and affiliations John MauleKirstie StanworthElizabeth PellicanoAnna Franklin Open Access S.I. : Local vs. Global processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders First Online: 28 April 2016 11 Shares 1.6k Downloads 5 Citations Abstract It has been suggested that attenuated adaptation to visual stimuli in autism is the result of atypical perceptual priors (e.g., Pellicano and Burr in Trends Cogn Sci 16(10):504–510, 2012. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009). This study investigated adaptation to color in autistic adults, measuring both strength of afterimage and the influence of top-down knowledge. We found no difference in color afterimage strength between autistic and typical adults. Effects of top-down knowledge on afterimage intensity shown by Lupyan (Acta Psychol 161:117–130, 2015. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.08.006) were not replicated for either group. This study finds intact color adaptation in autistic adults. This is in contrast to findings of attenuated adaptation to faces and numerosity in autistic children. Future research should investigate the possibility of developmental differences in adaptation and further examine top-down effects on adaptation. KeywordsAutism Afterimages Adaptation Color Top-down knowledge  Introduction Autism is characterized by difficulties in social communication and behavioral traits including rigid patterns of behavior, preference for sameness, and intense and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Sensory symptoms, including both hyper-reactivity and hypo-reactivity to external stimuli, atypicalities in sensory processing and unusual sensory interests are now included in the most recent revision of the diagnostic criteria for autism (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) (American Psychiatric Association 2013). This inclusion implies that they are part of the core of autism, with such atypical sensory experiences potentially also being related to other key features of the condition (Pellicano 2013). There has been a recent influx of hypotheses attempting to account for these sensory and perceptual differences in particular. Bayesian accounts of perception propose that information from sensory input is combined with prior knowledge or experience to facilitate the interpretation of the sensory information (e.g. Knill and Pouget 2004; Kersten et al. 2004). Pellicano and Burr’s (2012) hypo-priors account posits, within a Bayesian framework, that an under-weighting (relative to typical individuals) of the strength of prior information when interpreting sensory information may underlie autistic sensation and perception. Building on this work, others have proposed accounts of atypical (rather than simply reduced) priors in autism (e.g., Hellendoorn et al. 2015), and predictive coding accounts of autistic perception (Friston et al. 2013; Lawson et al. 2014; Sinha et al. 2014; Van de Cruys et al. 2013). One sensory process that could be affected by under-weighting of prior information is adaptation (Pellicano and Burr 2012). Adaptation is a fundamental property of neural networks and describes changes in neural activity in response to a persistent stimulus (Kohn 2007). Adaptation is thought to serve a crucial function for sensory systems, tuning neural responses to maximize sensitivity to the range of stimuli present in the immediate environment (e.g. Webster 2011). Adaptation to visual stimuli can result in the experience of aftereffects—distortions in perception which tend to bias perception in the opposite direction to that adapted (e.g. adaptation to a grating tilted to the left, causes a vertical grating to appear tilted slightly to the right (Clifford 2012). Since adaptation afterimages are directly related to the recent sensory input of the beholder, whereby prior sensory experiences are used to calibrate sensory systems and hence bias current perception, adaptation afterimages should therefore be attenuated in autism (Pellicano and Burr 2012). Several studies have found differences in adaptation aftereffects in autism. Research on high-level face identity aftereffects has shown that they are weaker in autistic compared to typical children (Ewing et al. 2013a; Rhodes et al. 2014), and that the strength of the aftereffect correlates significantly with autistic features, such that those with greater degrees of autistic features have the smallest aftereffects (Pellicano et al. 2007). Subsequent work has shown that adaptation is diminished in autistic children for facial configuration (Ewing et al. 2013b), facial emotion (Rutherford et al. 2012) and eye-gaze direction (Pellicano et al. 2013). There is also evidence for slightly reduced face identity aftereffects in parents (and siblings) of autistic children, suggesting that reduced ada (...truncated)


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John Maule, Kirstie Stanworth, Elizabeth Pellicano, Anna Franklin. Color Afterimages in Autistic Adults, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2016, pp. 1409-1421, Volume 48, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1007/s10803-016-2786-5