ABSTRACT

According to DSM IV, autism is a psychiatric developmental disorder with the following features: impairment of social interaction, impairment of verbal and nonverbal communication and imagination, repetitive stereotyped activities and an onset before the age of 3. There are four major theoretical paradigms trying to explain the disorder in terms of underlying core deficits: 1) Theory of mind - a modular metarepresentatinoal deficit: 2) Frontal lobe theory - a deficit of the executive functions driven by prefrontal cortex; 3) "Central coherence" theory - a local style of information processing that causes impairments in making sense of the stimuli; 4) Attentional theories -attentional deficits caused by an excess of opioid peptides in the CNS or by cerebellar anomalies. A critical analysis of the four suggests their complementarity rather than the primacy of one or another. Therefore, an integrative model is proposed, which includes the hard-core of each theory. Three levels of explanation are considered: computational, algorithmic and hardware level.