Neural signatures of impaired semantic contextualization in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Social and communicative deficits are defining characteristics of Autism Spectrum disorder (ASD). Some theories suggest that these challenges, among other autistic traits, may arise from differences in predictive coding, or how the brain uses context to predict and interpret incoming information. This idea has the potential to link symptoms of autism to specific neurocomputational processes, and is especially promising for communication, whose impairment is a hallmark of ASD. Here we leveraged the ability of large language models (LLMs) to quantify semantic contextualization to analyze a unique dataset of responses from hippocampal neurons obtained during language listening in three mild-to-severe autistic patients with comorbid epilepsy. Key elements of semantic coding were preserved in all three patients: single-neuron response dynamics, representation of word-word semantic relationships, and patterns of context-dependent shifts in meaning. However, relative to controls, ASD resulted in reduced neural signatures of contextualization: (1) neuronal responses were aligned with earlier, less contextual layers of GPT-2, (2) ASD patients had lower effective dimensionality of the neural subspace predicting semantics, (3) neural representations of word meaning were less influenced by preceding context, and (4) neural signatures of lexical surprisal were reduced. Together, these results support theories of autism that emphasize impairments in contextualization, and highlight the power of LLMs as a tool for quantifying the computational basis of neurodevelopmental disorders.