# Typical neural adaptation for familiar images in autistic adolescents

## TL;DR

The study found that autistic adolescents process familiar images similarly to non-autistic peers, contradicting theories about reduced context influence in autism.

## Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence against the hypothesis that autistic perception is less influenced by prior exposure to stimuli.

## Key findings

- Both autistic and non-autistic adolescents showed behavioral facilitation and reduced neural responses to familiar images.
- There was no significant difference between autistic and non-autistic groups in the effect of familiarity on behavior or neural responses.

## Abstract

It has been proposed that autistic perception may be marked by a reduced influence of temporal context. Following this theory, prior exposure to a stimulus should lead to a weaker or absent alteration of the behavioral and neural response to the stimulus in autism, compared with a typical population. To examine these hypotheses, we recruited two samples of human volunteers: a student sample (N= 26), which we used to establish our analysis pipeline, and an adolescent sample (N= 36), which consisted of a group of autistic (N= 18) and a group of non-autistic (N= 18) participants. All participants were presented with visual stimulus streams consisting of novel and familiar image pairs, while they attentively monitored each stream. We recorded task performance and used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure neural responses, and to compare the responses with familiar and novel images. We found behavioral facilitation as well as a reduction of event-related field (ERF) amplitude for familiar, compared with novel, images in both samples. Crucially, we found statistical evidence against between-group effects of familiarity on both behavioral and neural responses in the adolescent sample, suggesting that the influence of familiarity is comparable between autistic and non-autistic adolescents. These findings challenge the notion that perception in autism is marked by a reduced influence of prior exposure.