ABSTRACT
Autism is characterized by an array of specific social and nonsocial abnormalities. Not surprisingly, attention and theoretical speculation have tended to show a pendulum swing to and fro between the handicapping social and communication difficulties and the puzzling repetitive behaviors and fascinating special interests exhibited by people with autism. Current psychological theories of autism can be divided into those that posit a primary social impairment and those that suggest a primary nonsocial impairment. At present these two camps also divide along a different dimension: Social theories suggest a domain-specific difficulty (processing a certain stimulus class), whereas nonsocial theories implicate domaingeneral processes (which apply a certain process to many different types of content). The aim of the present chapter is to explore possible links between domain-specific social impairment and domain-general nonsocial abnormalities. Is it possible to trace a developmental path from a primary social deficit to the nonsocial features of autism, or vice versa? Of course there are alternatives to this sort of, perhaps unrealistic, parsimony. Autism may very well be the result of multiple primary deficits. Alternatively, the array of social and nonsocial features seen may result from a biological coincidence-disturbance to proximal but functionally unrelated brain substrates (Pennington et al., 1997). This chapter, however, explores possible links between social and nonsocial features of autism at the cognitive level.
