Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show varied phenotypes across social, communicative, sensory and motor domains. Thus, a productive approach in furthering our understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning ASD may be to characterize behaviors by their domain-general computations.

Jean-Paul Noel and colleagues recently demonstrated that some well-established multisensory behavioral anomalies in ASD are not due to impairments in multisensory integration per se, but in the broader domain-general computation of inferring the latent cause to observed sensory data: a process of causal inference¹. Noel and colleagues aim to examine the neural correlates of causal inference in humans with ASD, as well as neural circuit motifs in the shank3b KO and 16p11.2 del mouse models of ASD during a behavior requiring causal inference.

Noel and colleagues have developed a task capable of indexing causal inference in naturalistic contexts in humans and rodents. Here, they will use this behavior while concurrently recording electroencephalography (EEG) in humans with and without ASD, and extra-cellular spiking activity in frontal cortical areas in wildtype and mouse models of ASD (Shank3b KO and 16p11.2 del mice).

1. Noel J.-P. et al. Elife 11 (2022) PubMed