Fig. 1

Precision-weighting for perception inferences during emotional speech. A Within highly unstable sensory environments, higher precision may be ascribed to socio-emotional priors while a coarse decoding of the sensory evidence may optimize the perception (inferred estimate) of emotional prosodies. B Autistic mechanisms of perception may overestimate the environmental variability (incoming evidence), and fine-grained bottom-up inputs would be misinterpreted as predictions, leading to blurry prosodic contours differentiation (inferred estimates). C The reduction of voice’s variability creates more stable and unknown environments that would promote the precision towards the incoming evidence by neurotypicals without jeopardizing the differentiation of emotional prosodies. D We hypothesize that more reliable sensory environments may favor the differentiation of emotional prosodies by autistics