I'm going to tell you about some fMRI work that addresses the neurophysiological mechanisms by which people with autism pay attention during rapidly changing conditions. It turns out that these mechanisms differ from normal in interesting ways, even when behavioural performance is intact. In particular, I'm going to present physiological evidence that people with autism accomplish attentional tasks by substituting a generalised arousal for dysfunctional early selective attention, and then suppressing irrelevant stimuli at a later stage of processing.

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`fMRI Evidence for Generalised Arousal as a Substitute for Early Selection in Autism during Conditions of Shifting Visual Spatial Attention', Matthew Belmonte, 10 November 2001