Impact of early visual experience on later usage of color cues.

Human visual recognition is remarkably robust to chromatic changes. In this work, we provide a potential account of the roots of this resilience based on observations with 10 congenitally blind children who gained sight late in life. Several months or years following their sight-restoring surgeries, the removal of color cues markedly reduced their recognition performance, whereas age-matched normally sighted children showed no such decrement. This finding may be explained by the greater-than-neonatal maturity of the late-sighted children's color system at sight onset, inducing overly strong reliance on chromatic cues. Simulations with deep neural networks corroborate this hypothesis. These findings highlight the adaptive significance of typical developmental trajectories and provide guidelines for enhancing machine vision systems.

Development of a Self-Report Measure of Prediction in Daily Life: The Prediction-Related Experiences Questionnaire.

PURPOSE: Predictions are complex, multisensory, and dynamic processes involving real-time adjustments based on environmental inputs. Disruptions to prediction abilities have been proposed to underlie characteristics associated with autism. While there is substantial empirical literature related to prediction, the field lacks a self-assessment measure of prediction skills related to daily tasks. Such a measure would be useful to better understand the nature of day-to-day prediction-related activities and characterize these abilities in individuals who struggle with prediction. METHODS: An interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach was utilized to develop and validate a self-report questionnaire of prediction skills for adults, the Prediction-Related Experiences Questionnaire (PRE-Q). Two rounds of online field testing were completed in samples of autistic and neurotypical (NT) adults. Qualitative feedback from a subset of these participants regarding question content and quality was integrated and Rasch modeling of the item responses was applied. RESULTS: The final PRE-Q includes 19 items across 3 domains (Sensory, Motor, Social), with evidence supporting the validity of the measure's 4-point response categories, internal structure, and relationship to other outcome measures associated with prediction. Consistent with models of prediction challenges in autism, autistic participants indicated more prediction-related difficulties than the NT group. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides evidence for the validity of a novel self-report questionnaire designed to measure the day-to-day prediction skills of autistic and non-autistic adults. Future research should focus on characterizing the relationship between the PRE-Q and lab-based measures of prediction, and understanding how the PRE-Q may be used to identify potential areas for clinical supports for individuals with prediction-related challenges.

Rhythmic and interval-based temporal orienting in autism.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may show secondary sensory and cognitive characteristics, including differences in auditory processing, attention, and, according to a prominent hypothesis, the formulation and utilization of predictions. We explored the overlap of audition, attention, and prediction with an online auditory "temporal orienting" task in which participants utilized predictive timing cues (both rhythmic and interval-based) to improve their detection of faint sounds. We compared an autistic (n = 78) with a nonautistic (n = 83) group, controlling for nonverbal IQ, and used signal detection measures and reaction times to evaluate the effect of valid temporally predictive cues. We hypothesized that temporal orienting would be compromised in autism, but this was not supported by the data: the boost in performance induced by predictability was practically identical for the two groups, except for the small subset of the ASD group with co-occurring attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, who received less benefit from interval-based cueing. However, we found that the presence of a rhythm induced a significantly stronger bias toward reporting target detections in the ASD group at large, suggesting weakened response inhibition during rhythmic entrainment.

Prenatal auditory experience and its sequelae.

Towards the end of the second trimester of gestation, a human fetus is able to register environmental sounds. This in utero auditory experience is characterized by comprising strongly low-pass-filtered versions of sounds from the external world. Here, we present computational tests of the hypothesis that this early exposure to severely degraded auditory inputs serves an adaptive purpose-it may induce the neural development of extended temporal integration. Such integration can facilitate the detection of information carried by low-frequency variations in the auditory signal, including emotional or other prosodic content. To test this prediction, we characterized the impact of several training regimens, biomimetic and otherwise, on a computational model system trained and tested on the task of emotion recognition. We find that training with an auditory trajectory recapitulating that of a neurotypical infant in the pre-to-postnatal period results in temporally extended receptive field structures and yields the best subsequent accuracy and generalization performance on the task of emotion recognition. This strongly suggests that the progression from low-pass-filtered to full-frequency inputs is likely to be an adaptive feature of our development, conferring significant benefits to later auditory processing abilities relying on temporally extended analyses. Additionally, this finding can help explain some of the auditory impairments associated with preterm births, suggests guidelines for the design of auditory environments in neonatal care units, and points to enhanced training procedures for computational models.

Resilience of temporal processing to early and extended visual deprivation.

Early visual deprivation is known to have profound consequences on the subsequent development of spatial visual processing. However, its impact on temporal processing is not well characterized. We have examined spatial and temporal contrast sensitivity functions following treatment for early and extended bilateral visual deprivation in fifteen children born with congenital cataracts in rural India. The results reveal a marked difference in post-treatment spatial and temporal sensitivities. Whereas spatial processing in newly sighted children is significantly impaired relative to age-matched controls, temporal processing exhibits remarkable resilience and is comparable to that in the control group. This difference in spatial and temporal outcomes is especially surprising given our computational analyses of video sequences which indicate a strong linkage between the spatial and temporal spectral content of natural visual inputs. We consider possible explanations for this discrepancy.

Potential downside of high initial visual acuity.

Children who are treated for congenital cataracts later exhibit impairments in configural face analysis. This has been explained in terms of a critical period for the acquisition of normal face processing. Here, we consider a more parsimonious account according to which deficits in configural analysis result from the abnormally high initial retinal acuity that children treated for cataracts experience, relative to typical newborns. According to this proposal, the initial period of low retinal acuity characteristic of normal visual development induces extended spatial processing in the cortex that is important for configural face judgments. As a computational test of this hypothesis, we examined the effects of training with high-resolution or blurred images, and staged combinations, on the receptive fields and performance of a convolutional neural network. The results show that commencing training with blurred images creates receptive fields that integrate information across larger image areas and leads to improved performance and better generalization across a range of resolutions. These findings offer an explanation for the observed face recognition impairments after late treatment of congenital blindness, suggest an adaptive function for the acuity trajectory in normal development, and provide a scheme for improving the performance of computational face recognition systems.

Autism as a disorder of prediction.

A rich collection of empirical findings accumulated over the past three decades attests to the diversity of traits that constitute the autism phenotypes. It is unclear whether subsets of these traits share any underlying causality. This lack of a cohesive conceptualization of the disorder has complicated the search for broadly effective therapies, diagnostic markers, and neural/genetic correlates. In this paper, we describe how theoretical considerations and a review of empirical data lead to the hypothesis that some salient aspects of the autism phenotype may be manifestations of an underlying impairment in predictive abilities. With compromised prediction skills, an individual with autism inhabits a seemingly "magical" world wherein events occur unexpectedly and without cause. Immersion in such a capricious environment can prove overwhelming and compromise one's ability to effectively interact with it. If validated, this hypothesis has the potential of providing unifying insights into multiple aspects of autism, with attendant benefits for improving diagnosis and therapy.