I'd like now to get a bit more speculative as to where these results fit within the larger context of autism.

Recent results indicate that activity in intraparietal cortex can be evoked by tasks that demand suppression of distractors.

Furthermore, intraparietal activity is more sensitive to experimental manipulations of the ignored features of stimuli than to attended features.

These emerging results suggest that intraparietal cortex has a general role in attention which includes the suppression of irrelevant inputs. This response to suppressed stimuli is consistent with some single-unit studies in monkeys.

As I outlined last year here at IMFAR, we believe that the augmented effect of attention in intraparietal cortex in autism reflects an increased load on this suppressive process,

whereas the reduced attention effect in ventral occipital cortex reflects a decrease in earlier selective processing.

This combination of findings helps to sketch the outlines of a possible pattern of abnormal information flow in autistic perception.

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