Abstract
Prior beliefs play an important role in the oculomotor control and they are likely accomplished by using our sensory-motor system as an internal forward model. Prominent theories of autism spectrum disorder suggest that the integration between prior knowledge and sensory evidence may be affected in ASD. Saccadic adaptation can be used to study disturbances of sensory processing and motor planning. Here, we tested whether the buildup of weak priors affects the transfer of adaptation-induced changes in the motor command to other sensorimotor circuitry in healthy adults with various degrees of autistic traits (as measured by the Autistic Quotient Questionnaire). We show that individuals with high, but not low AQ failed to use the adapted efference copy to remap pre-saccadic target position to its predicted post-saccadic location. In addition, those with low autistic tendency show greater transfer of the shift from the saccade to the localization task while those with high autistic tendency do not. Finally, the pupils of people with ASD-type traits were larger after saccade execution and motor-localization compared to the low Autistic Traits subsample, suggesting a lack in reliance on prior beliefs that the target is not moving and thus resulting in a reduced sensitivity to target displacement. Our findings lend support to the assumption that learned prior knowledge is used for saccade planning and that the use of error signals for the internal recalibration of sensorimotor systems and the transfer of this recalibration to visual space perception is altered in the broader autism phenotype. In general, we show that predictions are important from basic levels of sensory-motor control and could play a role in the most abstract levels of processing, such as predicting social behavior.