Neural Network Model Provides Insight Into Autism Spectrum Disorder

The team of researchers then induced abnormalities in the neurons' activities during experiments, which helped provide insight into the effects on learning development and cognitive characteristics. The experiments demonstrated that generalization ability decreased in the model where heterogeneity of activity in the neural population was reduced. This suggested the formation of emotional clusters in higher-level neurons was inhibited, and it led to the neural network model having a tendency to fail in identifying the emotion of unknown facial expressions, which is also a symptom of autism spectrum disorder.