Pregistered movie-fMRI analyses reveal altered visual feature encoding in autism in pSTS

Abstract

Sensory-perceptual differences are widely reported in autism, yet their underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We tested preregistered hypotheses using stacked encoding models applied to naturalistic movie-viewing fMRI from children and adolescents with and without an autism diagnosis from the Healthy Brain Network. We mapped cortical responsiveness to low- and high-level auditory and visual feature spaces. Contrary to enhanced perceptual functioning predictions, autism was not associated with increased low-level encoding in primary sensory cortices. Instead, autistic children and adolescents had reduced high-level visual representations and a relative shift toward low-level over high-level feature encoding in integration and social brain regions including the pSTS and adjacent face/social areas. In pSTS, this high-low weighting tracked Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) scores. By contrast, audio-visual modality preference and sensory dominance were broadly conserved across groups. Developmentally, encoding exhibited strong, lateralized, modality-congruent age effects. Together, these findings favor weak central coherence accounts over early sensory enhancement, constrain mechanisms to altered visual feature weighting within social/multisensory networks, and demonstrate the value of naturalistic stimuli and encoding models for characterizing sensory-perceptual neurodevelopmental differences.