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[The progress and prospect of prepulse inhibition in autism.] [Article in Chinese]

WU Zhe-Meng, LEI Ming, WU Xi-Hong, LI Liang^*

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

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.

Key words: autism; prepulse inhibition; attentional deficits; fear conditioning; perceived spatial separation

Received: 2014-06-16　　Accepted: 2014-09-03

Corresponding author: 李量　　E-mail: liangli@pku.edu.cn

Citing This Article：

WU Zhe-Meng, LEI Ming, WU Xi-Hong, LI Liang. [The progress and prospect of prepulse inhibition in autism.] [Article in Chinese]. Acta Physiol Sin 2014; 66 (6): 730-738 (in Chinese with English abstract).