Inhibition in Cognitive Development: Contextual Impairments in Autism

Persons with autism, probably due to early sensory impairments, attend to and select for stimuli in an uncommon way. Inhibition of some features of a stimulus, such as location and shape, might be intact, while other features are not as readily inhibited, for example color. Stimuli irrelevant to the task might be attended to. This results in a learning process where irrelevant stimuli are erroneously activated and maintained. Therefore, we propose that the developmental pathway and behavior of persons with autism needs to be understood in a framework including discussions of inhibitory processes and context learning and maintenance. We believe that this provides a fruitful framework for understanding the causes of the seemingly diverse and complex cognitive difficulties seen in autism