Deficits that are the most obvious are not necessarily the most primary

Complex cognitive deficits may emerge developmentally from simpler antecedents

The theme that I'm going to try to leave you with today is that the deficits that are most obvious in autism may not necessarily be the most primary.

In particular, higher-order properties such as deficits in social communication may be developmental consequences of dysfunction in more elementary processes.

We suspect that selective attention may be one of these elementary processes.

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`Functional Anatomy of Compensatory Processing in Autistic Attention: Complementary Roles of Selection and Suppression', Matthew Belmonte, 1 November 2002