Date: Friday, April 23, 2021
Speaker: Pawan Sinha, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor of Vision and Computational Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Talk title: Prediction in Autism
Abstract: The hypothesis that autism may be associated with atypical predictive processes has served as an organizing theme for several empirical investigations in our and other laboratories. The appeal of this hypothesis derives from its potential as a unifying account for multiple, seemingly distinct, aspects of the autism phenotype. In this talk, I shall provide a brief motivation for this theoretical stance, review findings from the field at large that address it, and describe ongoing work within our and our collaborators’ labs designed to test it in multiple settings. The results thus far are mixed, with some supporting and other contradicting the hypothesis. This landscape of findings will, we hope, help guide refinements and revisions of whether and how prediction is affected in autism.