Adaptation and serial choice bias for low-level visual features are unaltered in autistic adolescents.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), or autism, is characterized by social and non-social symptoms, including sensory hyper- and hyposensitivities. A suggestion has been put forward that some of these symptoms could be explained by differences in how sensory information is integrated with its context, including a lower tendency to leverage the past in the processing of new perceptual input. At least two history-dependent effects of opposite directions have been described in the visual perception literature: a repulsive adaptation effect, where perception of a stimulus is biased away from an adaptor stimulus, and an attractive serial choice bias, where perceptual choices are biased toward the previous choice.

No evidence for altered up- and downregulation of brain activity in visual cortex during illusory shape perception in autism.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be marked by an altered balance between sensory input and prior expectations. Because many illusions rely on integrating sensory input with prior information such as spatial context, individuals with ASD may therefore be less susceptible to visual illusions than typically developing (TD) individuals. Yet empirical evidence on the matter is rather divergent, varying depending on the type of illusion, study procedure, and population.

Adolescents with autism show typical fMRI repetition suppression, but atypical surprise response.

Recent theoretical frameworks have hypothesized that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be marked by an altered balance between sensory inputs and prior knowledge-the so-called hypoprior hypothesis. Yet evidence regarding such an altered balance is mixed. Here, we aimed to test this hypothesis within the domain of visual perception, by examining how neural activity in the visual system was modulated by stimulus repetition and stimulus expectation in healthy and ASD participants.

Repetition suppression to objects is modulated by stimulus-specific expectations.

Repeated exposure to the same stimulus results in an attenuated brain response in cortical regions that are activated during the processing of that stimulus. This phenomenon, called repetition suppression (RS), has been shown to be modulated by expectation. Typically, this is achieved by varying the probability of stimulus repetitions (P) between blocks of an experiment, generating an abstract expectation that 'things will repeat'.

Shaping Science for Increasing Interdependence and Specialization.

Like art, science affords an individualistic career. However, increasingly, complexity necessitates increased interdependency and specialization. Despite this change, many institutions, funding agencies, and publishers insist on an exclusively individualistic model of science.

Expectation Suppression in Early Visual Cortex Depends on Task Set.

Stimulus expectation can modulate neural responses in early sensory cortical regions, with expected stimuli often leading to a reduced neural response. However, it is unclear whether this expectation suppression is an automatic phenomenon or is instead dependent on the type of task a subject is engaged in. To investigate this, human subjects were presented with visual grating stimuli in the periphery that were either predictable or non-predictable while they performed three tasks that differently engaged cognitive resources.

Lateralized power spectra of the EEG as an index of visuospatial attention.

The electroencephalogram (EEG) was measured in an endogenous orienting paradigm where symbolic cues indicated the likely side of to-be-discriminated targets. Combined results of event-related lateralizations (ERLs) and a newly derived measure from wavelet analyses that we applied on the raw EEG and individual event-related potentials (ERPs), the lateralized power spectra (LPS) and the LPS-ERP, respectively, confirmed the common view that endogenous orienting operates by anterior processes, probably originating from the frontal eye fields, modulating processing in parietal and occipital areas. The LPS data indicated that modulation takes place by increased inhibition of the irrelevant visual field and/or disinhibition of the relevant to-be-attended visual field.