ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology2017
The light-from-above prior is intact in autistic children.
Article in Journal of experimental child psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 52 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
- Autistic children sample costly information with increased variability due to inflexible updating.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Semantic projection as a method to measure individual differences in semantic scale length: insights from autism-related traits.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A common computational and neural anomaly across mouse models of autism.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- The "Tetris effect": autistic and non-autistic people share an implicit drive for perceptual cohesion.Molecular autism · 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
- Suboptimal but intact integration of Bayesian components during perceptual decision-making in autism.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- 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
- Intact predictive processing in autistic adults: evidence from statistical learning.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neural correlates of hierarchical predictive processes in autistic adults.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Increased context adjustment is associated with auditory sensitivities but not with autistic traits.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2022Article
- Autistic Traits are Associated with Less Precise Perceptual Integration of Face Identity.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2022Article
- Repeating patterns: Predictive processing suggests an aesthetic learning role of the basal ganglia in repetitive stereotyped behaviors.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Prior information use and response caution in perceptual decision-making: No evidence for a relationship with autistic-like traits.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2021Article
- Updating Expectations About Unexpected Object Motion in Infants Later Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2021Article
- Prediction learning in adults with autism and its molecular correlates.Molecular autism · 2021Article
- Article
- Reduced Context Updating but Intact Visual Priors in Autism.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2021Article
- Increased variability but intact integration during visual navigation in Autism Spectrum Disorder.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Sensory information is inherently ambiguous. The brain disambiguates this information by anticipating or predicting the sensory environment based on prior knowledge. Pellicano and Burr (2012) proposed that this process may be atypical in autism and that internal assumptions, or "priors," may be underweighted or less used than in typical individuals. A robust internal assumption used by adults is the "light-from-above" prior, a bias to interpret ambiguous shading patterns as if formed by a light source located above (and slightly to the left) of the scene. We investigated whether autistic children (n=18) use this prior to the same degree as typical children of similar age and intellectual ability (n=18). Children were asked to judge the shape (concave or convex) of a shaded hexagon stimulus presented in 24 rotations. We estimated the relation between the proportion of convex judgments and stimulus orientation for each child and calculated the light source location most consistent with those judgments. Children behaved similarly to adults in this task, preferring to assume that the light source was from above left, when other interpretations were compatible with the shading evidence. Autistic and typical children used prior assumptions to the same extent to make sense of shading patterns. Future research should examine whether this prior is as adaptable (i.e., modifiable with training) in autistic children as it is in typical adults.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.