Abstract
Predictive processing accounts of autism posit that individuals with autism rely less on expectations than those without autism when it comes to interpreting incoming sensory information. Since these expectations are claimed to underlie all information processing, we reason that any differences in how they are formed or adjusted should be persistent across multiple cognitive domains and detectable much earlier than clinicians can currently diagnose autism, around 3 years of age. This experiment is part of a longitudinal prospective study of young children with increased familial likelihood of autism. Around 20% of these children will receive an autism diagnosis, compared to 1% of the general population. The current electroencephalography study used an adaptation paradigm to investigate whether a reduced effect of expectations is already present in high-likelihood 2-year-olds, before autism can reliably be diagnosed. While we did not observe the adaptation aftereffect we expected, high-likelihood children habituated more than low-likelihood children, and the two groups did not differ in their overall responses to the manipulation, contrary to our hypotheses and previous findings.
