Difficulty in perceiving with meaning: An attentional approach to autism

Based on a review of the literature, and drawing upon other approaches to autism as well as upon autobiographical accounts by people with autism, this dissertation presents an approach to autism that connects autistic people's problems with language, social cognition, and other areas to specific underlying attentional problems. I suggest that in typical cognition, multiple levels of processing involved in perception and in schemas for concepts and actions (including levels involved in the comprehension and production of language) draw upon a common resource, identified here as attention or something closely underlying it. In addition, attention to perceptions and lower-level schemas may be decreased in favor of attention to higher-level schemas. In autism, however, narrowed attention or reduced attentional capacity may lead to difficulty in simultaneously attending to different aspects and levels of processing. Even when people with autism can attend to several levels, attention to lower levels may not be decreased in favor of attention to higher ones.; The hypothesized attentional misallocation may help explain specific problems with language in autism, including problems with prosody, meaning, figurative language, pragmatics, and conversation. Attentional misallocation could contribute to problems with theory of mind either directly, due to the multilayered nature of mental states concepts, or indirectly, through its effects on language and interaction. A speculative extension of the approach can explain the sensory abnormalities common in autism. Attentional misallocation may also contribute to the unusual profile of strengths and weaknesses in autism described by approaches such as the weak central coherence approach. The dissertation discusses possible neurological underpinnings of attentional misallocation as well as experiments which might be used to test for it. My approach does not suggest that attentional misallocation is the only factor in autism; other factors, including other attentional problems, executive dysfunction, and problems with emotions and social cognition, are also likely to be involved.