Data from: Contextual priors do not modulate action prediction in children with autism

Bayesian accounts of autism suggest that this disorder may be rooted in an
impaired ability to estimate the probability of future events, possibly
due to reduced priors. Here, we tested this hypothesis within the action
domain in children with and without autism using a behavioural paradigm
comprising a familiarization and a testing phase. During familiarization,
children observed videos depicting a child model performing actions in
diverse contexts. Crucially, within this phase, we implicitly biased
action-context associations in terms of their probability of
co-occurrence. During testing, children observed the same videos but
drastically shortened (i.e., reduced amount of kinematics information) and
were asked to infer action unfolding. Since during the testing phase
movement kinematics became ambiguous, we expected children’s responses to
be biased to contextual priors, thus compensating for perceptual
uncertainty. While this probabilistic effect was present in controls no
such modulation was observed in autistic children, suggesting an
impairment in using prior information when anticipating others’ actions
under situations of perceptual uncertainty.