ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2016
Can Bayesian Theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder Help Improve Clinical Practice?
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 144 citations in OpenAlex.
- Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Mismatch Negativity in Autism: Insights Into Predictive Mechanisms.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2025Pooled it
- Prediction in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2021Pooled it
- An examination of active inference in autistic adults using immersive virtual reality.Scientific reports · 2021Trial
- Prediction-based attention computing: a proof of concept study.Virtual reality · 2026Article
- The Impact of STEM Activities on Social Skills and Emotional-Behavioral Outcomes in Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- How mood shapes belief updating bias in depression.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Review
- A common computational and neural anomaly across mouse models of autism.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Computational Neuroscience's Influence on Autism Neuro-Transmission Research: Mapping Serotonin, Dopamine, GABA, and Glutamate.Biomedicines · 2025Review
- Atypical maturation of the functional connectome hierarchy in autism.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Do autistic individuals show atypical performance in probabilistic learning? A comparison of cue-number, predictive strength, and prediction error.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Linking Subclinical Autistic Traits and Perceptual Category Learning.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Disentangling the perceptual underpinnings of autism: Evidence from a face aftereffects experiment.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2025Article
- Integrating neuropsychoanalytic and neuropsychiatric perspectives into psychiatric clinical neuroscience curricula: a conceptual overview.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Review
- Closed-loop fMRI at the mesoscopic scale of columns and layers: Can we do it and why would we want to?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Neural Mechanisms of Social Interaction Perception: Observing Interpersonal Synchrony Modulates Action Observation Network Activation and Is Spared in Autism.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Erroneous predictive coding across brain hierarchies in a non-human primate model of autism spectrum disorder.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Disentangling sensory precision and prior expectation of change in autism during tactile discrimination.NPJ science of learning · 2023Article
- Investigating how Explicit Contextual Cues Affect Predictive Sensorimotor Control in Autistic Adults.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2023Article
- Testing predictive coding theories of autism spectrum disorder using models of active inference.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- TMS-induced inhibition of the left premotor cortex modulates illusory social perception.iScience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Diagnosis and individualized treatment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) represent major problems for contemporary psychiatry. Tackling these problems requires guidance by a pathophysiological theory. In this paper, we consider recent theories that re-conceptualize ASD from a "Bayesian brain" perspective, which posit that the core abnormality of ASD resides in perceptual aberrations due to a disbalance in the precision of prediction errors (sensory noise) relative to the precision of predictions (prior beliefs). This results in percepts that are dominated by sensory inputs and less guided by top-down regularization and shifts the perceptual focus to detailed aspects of the environment with difficulties in extracting meaning. While these Bayesian theories have inspired ongoing empirical studies, their clinical implications have not yet been carved out. Here, we consider how this Bayesian perspective on disease mechanisms in ASD might contribute to improving clinical care for affected individuals. Specifically, we describe a computational strategy, based on generative (e.g., hierarchical Bayesian) models of behavioral and functional neuroimaging data, for establishing diagnostic tests. These tests could provide estimates of specific cognitive processes underlying ASD and delineate pathophysiological mechanisms with concrete treatment targets. Written with a clinical audience in mind, this article outlines how the development of computational diagnostics applicable to behavioral and functional neuroimaging data in routine clinical practice could not only fundamentally alter our concept of ASD but eventually also transform the clinical management of this disorder.
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