Laboratory

in sensory physiology

The opinions of others have a profound influence on human decision-making. Graduate student Imogen Large tested 125 neurotypical and 30 autistic children between 6 and 14 years on a visual stereo-motion task under social influence. In neurotypical children, systematic bias in favour of advice provided by another person emerged around 12 years of age. Drift-diffusion modelling indicated that this social bias was best explained by changes in sensory processing of the visual stimulus that children were judging, rather than a change in decision behavior. By contrast, children with autism did not develop a perceptual bias by the same age. We conclude that by the early teens, typical neurodevelopment allows social influence to systematically bias perceptual processes - previously linked to dorsal stream visual areas for this task. That the same bias does not emerge in autistic children could potentially explain some of their difficulties when responding to social cues.

Graphs above show drift diffusion rates (y-axis) for different cylinder stimuli (along x-axes) and under different advice conditions (green + blue; advice 'cylinder rotates right'; advice 'cylinder rotates left').