Presentation

Kexin Cai¹², Saskia B.J. Koch², Margot Mangnus², Ivan Toni², Jana Bašnáková², Arjen Stolk¹²; ¹Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA, ²Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is diagnosed on the basis of communicative challenges experienced in everyday interactions, yet the cognitive sources of those challenges remain largely unknown. A popular suggestion holds that autistic individuals struggle to predict other people’s behaviors, either due to a bottleneck in bottom-up sensory processing or an attenuated sensitivity to top-down priors when perceiving communicative behaviors (e.g., Pellicano & Burr, 2012). However, studies of predictive processing in the perceptual domain have produced mixed results, and few studies to date have investigated ASD predictive abilities in the context of live social interaction. Using eye-tracking in ASD, this study assesses bottom-up and top-down contributions to interpreting genuinely interactive communicative behaviors. Predictive abilities are assessed while participants solve a series of coordination problems in the two-player “tacit communication game” (Wadge et al., 2019). In each round of this game, players have to jointly reproduce a target configuration of their two given shapes on a digital game board. However, the target configuration is shown to one of the players only, the Sender. Given that the other player, the Receiver, cannot see the target configuration, the Sender needs to move her shape in a way that conveys the location and orientation of the Receiver’s shape. When interpreting everyday ambiguous words and gestures, the Receiver needs to rapidly identify relevant features from the Sender’s movements to infer his target configuration. A benefit of the novel communicative medium is that it offers the possibility to manipulate access to top-down priors during communicative interpretation by introducing coordination problems that are more easily solved in light of previous interactions with the same partner. Furthermore, the digital movements allow for a tight quantitative overlay of eye gaze and communicative behavior in the identification of bottlenecks in bottom-up sensory processing. Preliminary results (20 neurotypical pairs; 18 ASD pairs) suggest that the communicative challenges experienced by autistic individuals cannot be attributed solely to limitations in bottom-up processing, as seen in the matched duration of task-relevant fixations between neurotypical and ASD participants. Second, autistic and neurotypical individuals’ eye gaze behavior exhibited a similar susceptibility to top-down priors established during previous interactions. These initial findings open the way to investigate the cognitive mechanisms that integrate bottom-up and top-down processes to produce accurate inferences about other people’s behavior in ASD.

Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Methods