Habituation, Adaptation and Prediction Processes in Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Comprehensive Review

Habituation, the simplest form of learning preserved across species and evolution, is characterized by a response decrease as a stimulus is repeated. This adaptive function has been shown to be altered in some psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or schizophrenia. At the brain level, habituation is characterized by a decrease in neural activity as a stimulation is repeated, referred to as neural adaptation. This phenomenon influences the ability to make predictions and to detect change, two processes altered in some neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. In this comprehensive review, the objectives are to characterize habituation, neural adaptation, and prediction throughout typical development and in neurodevelopmental disorders; and to evaluate their implication in symptomatology, specifically in sensitivity to change or need for sameness. A summary of the different approaches to investigate adaptation will be proposed, in which we report the contribution of animal studies as well as electrophysiological studies in humans to understanding of underlying neuronal mechanisms.