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Poster C121 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Rationalizing sensorimotor deficits in autism spectrum disorder during spatial navigation
yizhou chen1, Jean-Paul Noel2, Ruiyi Zhang2, Dora Angelaki23, Xaq Pitkow1; 1Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie mellon university, 2Center for Neural Science, New York University, 3Tandon School of Engineering, New York University
To perform well in natural environment or a task, subjects need to maintain and update beliefs about relevant latent variables. Understanding how subjects update beliefs during tasks is important, and we need a tool to measure such beliefs. Previous methods for inferring beliefs often rely on the assumption of optimal behavior, ignoring the fact that most of behavior are rational rather than optimal. Inverse Rational Control (IRC) is a novel framework to infer subjects' beliefs from behavior. We applied it for the first time to real experimental data to analyze sensorimotor anomalies in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) during spatial navigation. Subjects navigated using a joystick toward transiently visible targets guided by optic flow cues. Subjects' beliefs about target locations with uncertainty and subjective task costs, were inferred using IRC. Analysis of behavioral trajectories revealed reduced angular velocity estimates and lower subjective action costs in individuals with ASD. This approach enables rich characterization of latent dynamics in behavior, advancing neuroscience's understanding of neural computation in perception, prediction, and planning.
Keywords: Spatial navigation Autism spectrum disorder Inverse Rational Control Reinforcement learning