Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind

Hello everyone, it is August 3rd 2022 and it's OctInf Guest Stream number 25.1. We're here with Brett Anderson and we'll be hearing about autistic-like traits and positive schizotypy as diametric specializations of the predictive mind. There will be first a presentation followed by a discussion segment. So if you're watching live, feel free to add any comments or questions. And Brett, thank you again for joining and on with the presentation. All right, thank you Daniel for having me. So yeah, this is a paper that was published earlier this month. And so before I get into the paper, I should probably introduce myself just a little bit. So I am an evolutionary psychology PhD student at the University of New Mexico. My research mainly has to do with something called the diametric model of autism and psychosis, which I'll talk more about that here in just a minute. So I'm not trained in active inference or predictive processing. I came to this because I was looking for a theory that could explain variation along this autism schizotypy continuum. And I'll say what that is here in just a minute. And I came across Sanders, Vandercroys, and colleagues 2014, their paper about autism published in Psychological Review. And it was through that paper that I sort of came to write this paper because I realized at some point that that was the theory I was looking for and that the opposite configuration of what they put forward. So they said that autism results from giving an inflexibly high weight to sensory input. And what I realized through reading that paper and reading some other stuff around the topic was that giving an inflexibly low weight to sensory input does a really good job of explaining the other side of that continuum. And so that's what this paper is about. So I'm putting forward an explanation for a continuum of individual differences. So just an idea of what I'm going to talk about here. So I'm going to talk about the diametric model of autism and psychosis, what it is, what some of the evidence for it is, how it manifests in non-clinical populations, which is what my research mainly focuses on. And we refer to that as the autism schizotypy continuum. And then the hypothesis that I put forward in this paper, which has to do with explaining variation along this continuum due to trade-offs in precision weighting, due to precision weighting. And then I'll talk about some implications for predictive processing and active inference. So the diametric model of autism and psychosis was first put forward by Crespi and Badcock, Bernie Crespi and Christopher Badcock in a 2008 BBS paper. And it is very simply put, just the idea that autism spectrum conditions and psychosis spectrum conditions are cognitive and genetic opposites. Before I get into some of the evidence for it, I want to at least address what I think is the most common objection. I hear it all the time, which is that how can the diametric model be true given that some people who are diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition experience psychosis and vice versa, right? So there's comorbidity between these disorders. How can this diametric model be the case, be true? And I have a whole video about that on my YouTube channel. I might put the link in the comments to this YouTube video. But basically, the response to this objection is just to point out that DSM categories are extremely heterogeneous. So within each DSM category, you're going to find multiple etiologies, but that may be totally unrelated to each other in some cases. So for example, you could have somebody diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition that is diagnosed with that mainly because, for example, they have like a language condition, they have maybe a language delay, and that causes a communicative communication problem. And then they get the autism diagnosis. And it's not supposed to happen that way, but it definitely does happen that way. And so that would be different from somebody who has a more…