Autism Can Boost Cognitive Performance, And We May Finally Know Why

For decades, autism research has focused on behavioural, cognitive, social and communication difficulties. These studies highlighted how autistic people face issues with everyday tasks that allistic people do not. Some difficulties may include recognising emotions or social cues.

A similar thing happens in the brain with random fluctuations in neural activity. This is called neural noise. In simple terms, if we imagine the EEG responses like a sound wave, we would expect to see small ups and downs in allistic brains each time they encounter a stimulus. But autistic brains seem to show bigger ups and downs, demonstrating greater amplitude of neural noise.. A shift from the medical to a more social model has also seen advocacy for it to be reframed as a difference, rather than a disorder or deficit. This change has also entered autism research.

By using the static, we added additional visual noise to the neural noise already present in our participants' brains. We hypothesised the visual noise would push participants with low internal brain noise to perform better . The more interesting prediction was that noise would not help individuals who already had a lot of brain noise , because their own neural noise already ensured optimal performance.

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