用AI筛选和生成面部表情图像,更准确揭示自闭症人群的感知差异。
AI-guided stimuli discovery and generation to optimize facial emotion perception studies in autism
- 用神经网络预测自闭症与非自闭症群体对表情的反应差异。
- 模型选出的图像使两组行为差异增大,验证了方法有效性。
- 适合研究神经多样性感知机制或优化实验设计的学者。
理解自闭症与非自闭症成人之间的感知差异,需要敏感、可靠且具有机制信息的行为测试。面部情绪感知是一个理想范例,尽管已有研究报道两组差异,但结果不一致。本文发现这种变异性可能源于图像层面的稀疏性:自闭症与非自闭症在情绪判断上的差异集中在少数诊断性面部表情上,而非均匀分布于所有刺激。我们训练了针对不同群体的人工神经网络模型来预测个体对图像的情绪判断,进而利用这些模型选择出最能区分两组的新型面孔。在独立队列中,模型选出的图像产生的行为差异显著大于随机匹配图像。随后,我们使用相同模型结合生成对抗网络(GAN),将诊断性图像转化为更趋同的合成图像。在表型匹配的验证中,合成图像的行为分离程度低于原始图像。该结果建立了一个以模型引导的刺激发现与转化框架,可揭示群体特异性的感知差异。更广泛地,它表明行为表型研究可从固定刺激集的平均分析,转向优化实验条件以识别神经多样性感知的分化或趋同情境。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Understanding perceptual differences between autistic and neurotypical adults requires behavioral assays that are sensitive, reliable, and mechanistically informative. Facial emotion perception is a useful test case because group differences have been reported, but findings vary across studies. Here we show that this variability may reflect image-level sparsity: autistic-neurotypical differences in emotion judgments were concentrated in a small subset of diagnostic facial expressions rather than spread uniformly across stimuli. We trained population-specific artificial neural network models to predict image-level judgments for autistic and neurotypical participants, then used these models to select novel faces predicted to maximize group separation. In an independent cohort, model-selected images produced larger behavioral differences than matched random images. We then used the same models with a generative adversarial network to transform diagnostic images toward greater predicted group agreement. In phenotype-matched validation, synthesized images reduced behavioral separation relative to their matched originals. These results establish a model-guided framework for discovering and transforming stimuli that reveal population-specific perceptual differences. More broadly, they show how behavioral phenotyping can move beyond averaging across fixed stimulus sets toward optimized assays that identify the conditions under which neurodivergent perception diverges or converges.
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