Special Treatment of Prediction Errors in Autism Spectrum Disorder, 2018-2021

According to HIPPEA (High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism), in autism, neural processes are putting inflexibly high precision on prediction errors, irrespective of context. We used an apparent motion paradigm to test this prediction. This dataset contains the anonymised data from 11 autistic and 9 non-autistic participants, who took part in an apparent motion paradigm similar to the one presented by Sanders et al., 2012) to participants with Schizophrenia. The participants had to detect a flashing stimulus, that appeared either in-time (predictable) or out-of-time (unpredictable) with the apparent motion. We observed that 66% (6/9) neurotypical and (64%) 7/11 autistic participants were better at detecting predictable targets. Thus, autistic participants were likely able to use the apparent motion to establish a predictive model of the stimuli, benefiting their ability to detect the predictable over the unpredictable target. Additionally, 55% (6/11) of autistic participants had faster responses for unpredictable targets, whereas only 22% (2/9) neurotypicals had faster responses to unpredictable compared to predictable targets. Thus, it appears that for autistic participants unpredictable events are given special treatment in the brain, even if those targets are not detected more often. This data does not fulfill the power calculations for a robust effect, thus all of the data is being shared including experiment and data analysis pre-processing and final analysis scripts. Moreover, a pre-registered analysis is available for researchers to finish off the results of this study - https://osf.io/729cr