People with autism are less surprised by the unexpected

Adults with autism may overestimate the volatility of the world around them, finds a new UCL study published . The researchers found that adults with autism were less surprised by unexpected images in a simple learning task than adults without autism, and those who were the least surprised had the most pronounced symptoms. "We know from previous studies that people with autism often aren't surprised by things that would surprise other people," said lead author Dr Rebecca Lawson (UCL Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging). "Our results suggest that this may be because of differences in how people with autism build expectations. Our expectations bias our behaviour in subtle ways, so being less susceptible to these effects may result in strengths as well as difficulties." Insistence on sameness and intolerance of change are part of the diagnostic criteria for autism, but there has been little research addressing how people with autism represent and respond to unexpected changes to their environment. In this study, 24 adults with autism and 25 adults without autism completed a task that involved learning to expect to see different pictures on a computer screen after hearing either a high or low sound. The researchers applied computational modelling to the data to characterize each person's learning process.