Unreliable neural activity may be expected to degrade perception and generate variability in behavior. A common finding in autism is that individuals with autism exhibit enhanced perception of details and degraded perception of holistic/gestalt stimuli (Simmons et al., 2009). It may be difficult to understand how unreliable neural activity might improve perception of some stimuli and degrade perception of other stimuli. R428 purchase However, greater neural response variability in early visual cortex may enhance the perception of local details through stochastic resonance (McDonnell and Abbott,
2009) and, at the same time, degrade perception of gestalt stimuli (Simmons et al., 2009). Alternatively, greater response variability could alter neural plasticity and learning in a way that would favor overclassification of local details at the expense of gestalt perceptual organization (Cohen, 1994). With regards to behavior,
there is evidence that individuals 5-Fluoracil with autism do exhibit greater trial-by-trial motor variability, which is evident in the accuracy of both reaching movements (Glazebrook et al., 2006) and saccadic eye movements (Takarae et al., 2004). Greater trial-by-trial reaction time variability in autism is evident for a variety of tasks (Castellanos et al., 2005; Geurts et al., 2008) as was also the case in our letter repetition-detection task (Figure S8). Determining the relationship between greater neural response variability and the behavioral symptoms of autism will clearly require additional research. It is notable that signal-to-noise ratios of individuals with autism exhibited a trend of positive correlations with this website IQ scores and negative correlations with autism severity scores (Figure 5), provocatively suggesting that cortical response reliability might be related
to the level of behavioral abilities in autism. We speculate that poor response reliability may be directly related to the development of both secondary and core symptoms of autism. With respect to secondary symptoms, unreliable neural networks are susceptible to epileptic seizures (Rubenstein and Merzenich, 2003), which is one of the most prominent comorbidities in autism (Tuchman and Rapin, 2002). Unreliable neural responses in sensory and motor cortices may also explain why the vast majority of individuals with autism exhibit debilitating sensory sensitivities (Marco et al., 2011), motor clumsiness, and balance problems (Whyatt and Craig, 2012).