The period was a challenging one – with COVID limiting so many of our experiments. Still, we conducted many studies.
A. We made substantial progress in measuring behavioral difficulties in detecting temporal regularities, in dyslexia and in autism compared to the general population (WP1). We found that, as we hypothesized, people with autism have difficulties in fast updating of their motor plans, as manifested in paced finger tapping, where people with autism are much more variable. Modelling the tapping data (WP3) allowed us to specifically locate the difficulty to slow error correction rather than to generally noisy representation of temporal intervals (Vishne et al., Nat Com, 2021).
B. We conducted an imaging study (WP5) on dyslexia, aimed to measure whether difficulties in detecting non-consecutive regularities are manifested already in sensory cortices. We found that dyslexia is indeed characterized by difficulties in benefitting from structural regularities in simple pitch discrimination, and that these difficulties are manifested in no-adaptation to such regularities, in contrast to good readers’, in auditory cortices including the primary auditory cortex (Gertsovski & Ahissar, 2022).
C. We collected tapping data of typical children ages 5-9 years (WP2), to trach the developmental trajectory of the ability to synchronize. At age 9 they still do not attain adult level performance. Modelling their tapping shows that their variability, is larger than neurotypical adults’ and is similar to that of adults with autism. Yet, it is due to a different mechanism. Unlike in autism, children’s error-correction mechanism is efficient. However, their retention of temporal intervals is noisy. Thus, though descriptively similar to adults with autism, their underlying mechanisms are quite different (Dobner et al, ISCOP 2022).
D. We have recorded EEG activity to assess the dynamics of adaptation in autism (WP4). We used a protocol we developed – presenting fixed inter stimuli interval and different inter-trial intervals in different blocks. Our preliminary results suggest that adaptation lasts longer in ASD, perhaps explaining their inflexibility in modifying predictions.
E. We launched a set of behavioral studies that systematically characterize the dynamics of learning in ASD and in dyslexia in both simple and complex stimuli, in different modalities (WP1): face categorization, motor planning, and perception of temporal intervals. These studies are in progress.
