People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to detect lo-
cal patterns of visual stimuli more quickly than global patterns,
which is opposite to the behavior of typically developing peo-
ple. We hypothesized that the imbalance between excitation
and inhibition neurons in the visual cortex causes the local pro-
cessing bias observed in ASD. Stronger inhibitory connections
could diminish the neural activities and thus prevent global fea-
ture integration, whereas properly balanced connections would
enable the cortex to detect features of any size. We verified
our hypothesis by employing a computational neural network
called a neocognitron. Our experimental results demonstrated
that the network with stronger inhibitory connections exhib-
ited a local processing bias, whereas the network with properly
adjusted connections showed a moderate global bias. More-
over, the networks with extremely strong or weak inhibitions
revealed no perception bias. These results suggest that an ex-
citation/inhibition imbalance causes multiple types of atypical
perception in ASD.