Introspective reports reveal explicit conscious strategies in visual processing in Austism Spectrum Disorders

JOAQUIN AIS; PABLO BARTFELD; MARTIN GRAZIANO; MARIANO SIGMAN

Congreso; XXVI Annual Meeting of the Argentine Society for Neurosciences; 2011

.Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) refer to neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by poor social communication abilities in combination with repetitive behaviours and restricted interests (APA, 2000). Over the last years, anatomical and functional brain studies have converged to the hypothesis that ASD is associated with atypical connectivity, probably producing a system that is ineffective for integrating complex information at the neural and cognitive level Subjective confidence beliefs are ubiquitous in decision-making , and can be studied by means of subjective reports of confidence on objective performance. This ability, henceforth referred as a subject introspective ability, is largely variable across subjects. This introspective ability could be an important tool to assess the particularities of ASD people in visual processing and concious access to raw features of stimuli. However, it has not yet been explored. Through a Partial Report Paradigm (PR) experiment, we explored whether subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorders(ASD) have an altered conscious access to visual stimuli. Subjects had to identify a cued letter in a crowded context, and had to quantify their degree of confidence in their decision on a continuous scale from 0% confidence (subject reporting a random decision) to 100% confidence. Results showed that while having a slightly worse objective performance than controls, the subjective beliefs of ASD subjects reflected their objective performance better than controls?. Specifically, ASD subjects presented more sensitivity (less ?high confidence errors?). Control subjects, on thecontrary, frequently reported high confidence when making errors, and vice-versa, low confidence when answering correctly , a hallmark of unconcious processing. This suggests that ASD subjects have an increased conscious access to visual stimuli, an idea in line with theories of enhanced visual perception of autism (Mottron el al, 2005).