Role of Precision Weighting in Autism and Self-Identification

Seth and Friston (2016), in a review of active interoceptive inference, described proposals that the phenomenology of autism reflects false inference arising from a loss of prior precision relative to sensory precision. They noted that a failure to attenuate the precision of interoceptive prediction errors has been proposed to carry profound implications for the developing distinction between self and other, given its proposed disruption of the acquisition of generative models that depend on accurately weighting interoceptive evidence. The authors concluded that if this account is correct, it points to abnormalities of precision gain control in cortical systems mediating interoceptive inference, such as the anterior insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex.
(Seth & Friston, 2016)