Research interests

We never see the world exactly as it is. The information we receive through our senses is always combined with what we expect to see, which means that our expectations are constantly biasing our perception. For example, in this image of a chessboard, there are two squares marked A and B:

The squares are actually exactly the same colour, but because of what we know about light and shadow, we interpret square B as lighter. After all, if a shadow falls on an object it looks darker than it really is. Because our knowledge of light and shadow is built on lots and lots of experience, it's very hard to ignore this information and focus only on the colours on the screen.

If we cover the rest of the image, and look at the squares without the context of the shadow, however, it becomes obvious that they are the same colour: 

This shows how strongly our expectations can change what we believe we're seeing.

In my postdoctoral research, I am investigating how our expectations change what we're seeing when something very unexpected happens. This is interesting because our expectations exert a bias over our perception, but when something unexpected happens we have the opportunity to learn something new. We know that people do learn from these unexpected situations, but it's not clear how, when our expectations are biasing us so much.

I'm curious how we can learn from these unexpected situations and am investigating that using different experiments with non-autistic adults at the moment, and hope to extend this work to autistic adults in the near future.

For my PhD, I researched the way expectations shape perception differently in autistic children and young people, as well as in the family members of autistic people. Specifically, I'm interested in the idea that autistic individuals might weight their prediction errors more highly than non-autistic individuals, which means that when something is unexpected, autistic people would be more likely to integrate that information into their future expectations.

To give a simple example, if the bus comes every day at 9:00, someone wanting to catch that bus should get to the bus stop by 9:00 and everything will go smoothly. If one day the bus comes at 9:10 (because there was an accident or extra traffic that day), this theory would predict that autistic individuals would be more likely to assume that the bus will come at 9:10 every day from now on, while non-autistic people might at first assume that this change was a one-off. The autistic individual may then decide to go to the bus stop at 9:10 the next day, and if it was indeed a one-off then they would miss the bus.

Of course, this is an oversimplification, but because we know that we use expectations constantly to interpret incoming sensory information, it may be true that autistic individuals do respond this way to small changes in the environment. This is not always a negative thing: often changes in what we observe, like the bus arrival time, are in fact a sign that something important has changed and we need to adapt, but it would be very tiring to keep adapting every time the bus was slightly earlier or later if the timetable hasn't actually changed.