Descripción del proyecto
Comprensión de los mecanismos subyacentes al autismo
Las personas con trastornos del espectro autista (TEA, o ASD por sus siglas en inglés) muestran déficits en las interacciones sociales y la comunicación, pero se necesita más información sobre los mecanismos subyacentes a estos trastornos. Los científicos del proyecto PreCoASD, financiado con fondos europeos, abordarán la idea de que los TEA surgen debido a un equilibrio subóptimo entre la precisión de la información predicha y la sensorial. En el estudio que realizarán, los participantes se someterán a tareas visuales y sus umbrales de precisión de percepción y de estimación serán evaluados mediante diversas técnicas de espectroscopia y obtención de imágenes. Los resultados podrían ayudar a explicar la heterogénea sintomatología de los TEA y conducir a una teoría más definida sobre estos trastornos.
Objetivo
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects more than seven million individuals in the European Union. Yet, this neurodevelopmental disorder remains poorly accounted for. ASD is defined by persistent deficits in social interactions and communication, and by restricted interests and repetitive patterns of behaviors. Recent predictive coding theories offer potential accounts of ASD.
The predictive coding framework assumes that the brain constantly generates predictions about its environment. These predictions, or priors, are integrated with sensory information to produce a percept, and their relative contributions depend on their precisions. A suboptimal balance of prior and sensory precisions could be at the core of ASD. Theories suggest low prior precision, high sensory precision and/or inflexible ratio of precisions in ASD. Empirical evidences are scarce, and this proposal aims at testing these theories. I aim at characterizing the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying the estimation of prior (WP1) and sensory (WP2) precisions in ASD.
In WP1, participants will perform a visual task designed to elicit the implicit learning of a prior with a high or low precision (quantifiable with computational models). The neural correlates of prior precision estimation will be investigated with functional and structural MRI, DTI, and magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
In WP2, participants will be passively exposed to fast periodic visual stimulations. Using a sweep paradigm with visual stimuli changing in magnitude of low-level features, we will determine their perception thresholds from the EEG data. Sensory precision will be estimated from both EEG and behavioral measurements of perception thresholds.
In WP3, I will integrate the results of WP1 and WP2 together to suggest a refined theory of ASD and I will relate these findings to the symptoms of ASD.
Altogether, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the heterogeneous symptomatology of ASD.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinador
3000 Leuven
Bélgica