The progress and prospect of prepulse inhibition in autism.
- Author:
Zhe-Meng WU
1
;
Ming LEI
;
Xi-Hong WU
;
Liang LI
Author Information
1. Department of Psychology, Speech and Hearing Research Center, Key Laboratory on Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Beijing Institute for Brain Disorders, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. liangli@pku.edu.cn.
- Publication Type:Journal Article
- MeSH:
Attention;
Autistic Disorder;
Fear;
Humans;
Prepulse Inhibition;
Reflex, Startle
- From:
Acta Physiologica Sinica
2014;66(6):730-738
- CountryChina
- Language:Chinese
-
Abstract:
Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is suppression of the startle reflex when an intense startling stimulus is preceded by a weaker sensory stimulus (the prepulse). It is an operational measurement of sensorimotor gating mechanism to help human adapt to complex environment. This weak prepulse protect central cognitive processing by damping the effect of intense stimuli. Autistics cannot select out behaviorally important information from a lot of irrelevant resources and reflect abnormal gating mechanism and attentional abnormalities. Previous studies have not made agreement on whether autistic patients demonstrated deficits in PPI, because the results depend on age, sex, severity of the disease as well as the experimental parameters used. Moreover, these studies have not covered whether autistics have suffered deficits in higher-order processing. In this review, the "top-down" modulation of selective attention and subjective emotion are introduced into the PPI experiment. We also introduce fear conditioning and perceived spatial separation paradigm to further explore the interaction between autistic cognitive process and gating mechanism.
