“You never experience exactly the same situation twice. The second time is always slightly different," Sanders said..”

This research is relevant to autism. Here’s why. (Thread) https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-distinguish-contexts-animals-probabilistically.html

First I’m going to explain the article. The research it is talking about involves the hippocampus - the seahorse-shaped part of the brain that handles learning and memory. Autistic people often have differences in their hippocampus. Ours tends to be bigger, for one thing.

The research isn’t focused on autism though, it’s focused on how rats’ spatial skills. They are studying what rats do if they have memorized two mazes and then get shown a new one that is similar to the other two.

We tend to make “maps” in our head of where things are. We know where our bedroom is in our house for example. This uses the hippocampus.

When we are in an unfamiliar place, we need to make a new “map” in our heads, which takes some and mental energy. This is why business chains use similar layouts in all their stores. So people can use their old mental maps in a new Walmart.

The researchers in this study are examining how different a maze has to be for the rat to justify making a new “map” rather than relying on an old one. Think of going into a mcDonalds for the first time and guessing where the bathrooms are likely to be.

This is important to rat researchers because even if a maze’s smell is different the rat may perceive it as a totally new location, not the same maze they were in yesterday. That can throw off results.

The researchers found that rats are very aware of minor changes, and even minor changes can make the rat think it is in a totally new location, so it makes a new map instead of relying on its memory from yesterday.

They found that the more mazes a rat did, the more likely they were to figure out the difference between a truly new maze versus yesterday’s maze. They got better at recognizing mazes despite small changes.

They also came up with a math equation for predicting at what point a rat would rely on memory versus explore and make a new mental map b it that’s not what I’m interested in. It’s the idea of small changes like smell triggering a re-mapping.

Everyone has walked into their regular grocery store at some point and discovered that aisles have been rearranged. For NTs this is a minor annoyance. For #actuallyautistic people this is a disaster.

Maybe that’s because we are more aware of minor changes in our environment, and our brains are more likely to re-map a location. So even though we know it’s the same store, a minor change makes our brains think we are in a totally alien place.

I bet that if you made math equations of NTs and how much novelty they need to trigger a re-map, that the same equation would not work for autistic folks.

An NT walks into a new Walmart, looks around, and says “okay, seasonal items should be over here.” But an autistic brain might be like “everything is different!! This is a totally new location and I have no idea where to go!”

This could also apply to our difficulty with faces. We know that autistic people are more likely to be face blind or, like me, face impaired. We map people’s faces, too, to tell people apart.

When people complain that members of another race “all look alike” it’s because they haven’t seen enough of those faces to detect minor differences. They haven’t mapped that style of face and all they see when they look at them is the big differences. (Diversity on tv please!!)

I think NTs often don’t re-map enough. They keep relying on old maps (like white faces) instead of making a new map (of Black or East Asian faces). But using old maps is obviously handy a lot of the time.

It must be nice to be able to ignore minor changes without becoming totally lost in a familiar location. It’s probably nice to be able to walk into a McDonald’s while travelling and know where everything is.

But on the other hand, I actually READ SIGNS in stores because I don’t have a map for this new location and am building one from scratch. I often find the pasta aisle faster than a confused NT when the grocery store rearranges because I READ THE SIGNS.

Meanwhile the NT is going “it used to be here...” but I’ve already detected a change, am building a new map and am looking around for clues instead of relying on an outdated map.

But this kind of research shows yet another reason why it’s good for autistic people to prefer familiar locations rather than trying new places. If we are more prone to re-mapping, then, like the rats, it’s going to take a lot of return visits to create a reliable mental map

But once the rats had done enough mazes enough times, they developed the skills to recognize when it was really a truly different location, and when it was the same maze with a few minor changes. I think we can too.

I’ll always be a bit more disoriented than NTs in a new location whenever the NT can rely on old maps but I also think I am getting better at map building and will soon be able to learn my way around a new location faster than a NT can.