FURTHER WORK

• task to dissociate suppression from possible oculomotor planning
• children (ages 10 to 14)
• examine frontal regions too
• compare `unaffected' sibs

This is all very speculative, of course, as there is only so much that can be inferred from a small and heterogeneous sample of adults.

The intraparietal result was an unexpected finding, and in our current work we'll be addressing the role of suppression more directly, in a way that dissociates it from possible effects of oculomotor planning.

We're also looking at younger ages to try to get a bit closer to the origins of these dysfunctions,

and examining the role of frontal regions.

An important aspect of our continuing work is the inclusion of a separate comparison group of non-autistic sibs who show features of the broader autism phenotype. If indeed low-level abnormalities of attention contribute to autism's developmental chain of cause and effect, it is important to characterise such traits in cases in which susceptibility factors have not become magnified into the full syndrome of autism.

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