Neural noise. Scientists have finally discovered the reason for the high cognitive abilities of people with autism

 Research has shown that people with autism are better at some cognitive tasks than others. And the reason for this lies in neural noise.

For decades, autism research has focused on behavioral, cognitive, social, and communication difficulties. These papers emphasized that people with autism face problems in everyday tasks that people without autism do not, including recognizing emotions or social cues. However, recent studies have shown that people with autism can cope with some cognitive tasks better than others.

In particular, people with autism may be more successful at identifying a simple shape embedded in a complex structure, arranging blocks of different shapes and colors, or identifying an object in a cluttered visual environment. Such increased performance was reported in infants as young as nine months who had developed signs of autism. A recent study, described in an article for The Conversation by a group of researchers from the University of Canberra, showed that the reason for this lies in the high level of so-called neural noise. These are fluctuations in neural activity that complement any brain activity caused by the things we see, hear, smell, and touch.

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Evidence of high levels of neural noise in autism can be seen in electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. Psychology and perception researcher David Simmons and his colleagues at the University of Glasgow previously missed that while high neural noise is usually a disadvantage in autism, it can sometimes be beneficial through a phenomenon called stochastic resonance.

This idea was investigated and partially confirmed during the experiment. Scientists from the University of Canberra recruited a group of subjects and studied how effective they were at performing tasks of identifying letters in images. At the same time, their level of autistic traits was measured.

“We conducted two letter recognition experiments (one in the lab and one online) where participants had to identify a letter when it was displayed in a visual background of varying intensities. By using static, we added additional visual noise to the neural noise already present in our participants' brains. … Indeed, one of our experiments showed that people with high neural noise (and high autistic traits) did not benefit from additional noise. In addition, they showed better performance (higher accuracy) compared to people with low neural noise when the added visual static was low. This means that their own neural noise has already caused a natural stochastic resonance effect, leading to better performance,” the researchers write.

Although the experiment did not include participants with clinically diagnosed autism, it showed that the theory of improved performance due to stochastic resonance in autism has its merits.