How minds differ
When the world seems more changeable than it is
In shortSome people treat small surprises as signs that the rules have changed, so each day can feel new.
The idea
To learn well, the brain has to decide whether a surprise is a one-off or a sign that things have changed. Some people treat many small surprises as signs of change. Each day then seems to have new rules, what was learned before seems worth less, and routines, sameness and control over what comes next become very valuable. Adults may see stubbornness; from the inside, it may be the sensible response to a world that seems to keep changing.
What to try
- Make what is stable obvious: the same words, the same order, the same place for things, and say so (‘this part stays the same’).
- When something changes, present it as an exception and say when things go back to normal.
- Introduce changes in small, announced steps, with the stable parts around them easy to see.
The common mistake
Adding variety to ‘build flexibility’ before the person trusts that the stable parts will hold.
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The science behind itHow strong the evidence is, the model, videos and references.
How strong the evidence is
Promising Good studies, but little tested with children at home or school, or the step to daily life is our interpretation.
Hierarchical Bayesian models (Behrens et al., 2007; Mathys et al., 2011) separate expected uncertainty (noise within a stable world) from volatility (how fast the world itself changes); the learning rate should rise with volatility and fall with noise. Lawson, Mathys and Rees (2017) found that autistic adults overestimated volatility in a probabilistic learning task, with smaller pupil responses to unexpected events, consistent with surprises being treated as changes of context. Pulcu and Browning (2019) review misestimation of uncertainty across affective conditions. For formulation: ask whether reactions follow small deviations from the expected (consistent with high estimated volatility) or large aversive events, and test whether marking the stable elements explicitly lowers the reaction. Findings are group-level and task-specific; they describe a possible mechanism to test in one person, not a trait of a diagnostic group.
References
- Behrens, T. E. J., Woolrich, M. W., Walton, M. E., & Rushworth, M. F. S. (2007). Learning the value of information in an uncertain world. Nature Neuroscience, 10(9), 1214–1221.
- Mathys, C., Daunizeau, J., Friston, K. J., & Stephan, K. E. (2011). A Bayesian foundation for individual learning under uncertainty. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, 39.
- Lawson, R. P., Mathys, C., & Rees, G. (2017). Adults with autism overestimate the volatility of the sensory environment. Nature Neuroscience, 20(9), 1293–1299.
- Pulcu, E., & Browning, M. (2019). The misestimation of uncertainty in affective disorders. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(10), 865–875.
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