A more precise look at context in autism

In a recent paper, Rosenberg et al. (1) present a compelling explanation for the perceptual symptoms of autism in terms of a failure of divisive normalization. In divisive normalization the output of individual neurons is scaled (or divided) by the combined activity of the neural population in which they are embedded, and thus local visual context provides a means of gain control—a volume dial—for stimulus-evoked responses. However, to properly understand the wider mechanistic implications, beyond local inhibition or gain in the visual cortex, one has to posit a biologically plausible instantiation of context-sensitive neural responses across multiple timescales and hierarchical levels …