Autism: A Window onto the Development of the Social and the Analytic Brain

Simon Baron-Cohen and Matthew K Belmonte

Annual Review of Neuroscience 28:109-126 (2005).

ABSTRACT
Although the neurobiological understanding of autism has been increasing exponentially, the diagnosis of autism spectrum conditions still rests entirely on behavioural criteria. Autism is therefore most productively approached by a combination of biological and psychological theory. Psychologically, autism's triad of behavioural abnormalities in social function, communication, and restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests can be explained by an impaired capacity for empathizing, or modelling the mental states governing the behaviour of people, along with a superior capacity for systemizing, or inferring the rules governing the behaviour of objects. This empathizing-systemizing theory explains other psychological models such as impairments of executive function or central coherence, and may have a neurobiological basis in abnormally low activity of brain regions subserving social cognition along with abnormally high activity of regions subserving lower-level, perceptual processing, a pattern that may result from a skewed balance of local versus long-range functional connectivity.

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