Autism is the umbrella term for a family of neurodevelopmental disorders characterised
by heterogeneous clinical presentations affecting social interaction, communication, sensory
atypicalities and restricted and repetitive behaviours (DSM 5). The idea of a unifying
explanation that can account for the range of cognitive, behavioural and neurological features
associated with autism is attractive, but as of yet no such cognitive or physiological
underpinnings have been identified.
However, the last years have seen a growing interest in using approaches within the
nascent field of the predictive processing framework to explore the potential causal role of
aberrant prediction for the autistic phenotype. While hypothesised differences in predictive
abilities have demonstrated some explanatory power for symptoms of psychotic spectrum
disorders, empirical investigations into autism are still sparse.
In this thesis I follow up on the theoretical work about difficulties with expectation
generation in autism with three empirical studies on prediction in perception and sensory
processing (Chapters 2-4). My results did not support the idea of autism as a generalised
disorder of prediction; however better phenotyping in future work might help to tease apart
some of the variability observed in the autism group.
Furthermore I also examined the psychometric properties of two widely-used self-report
questionnaires assessing autistic traits and schizotypy (Chapter 5). If latent traits are not
measured equivalently across clinical and non-clinical populations, this could have implications
for studies using high self-reported traits in healthy participants as proxies for the
clinical condition as well as for correlational studies.Christ's College, Cambridg
