People with autism are famously said to have a razor-sharp attention to detail, but sometimes miss the big picture: to sketch a skyscraper, an artist with autism begins with the shadings of each tiny windowpane. A boy throws a tantrum if his bus takes a new route to school. When looking at a cooing woman's face, a toddler doesn't look into her warm, expressive eyes, but instead fixates on her moving mouth.Over the past few years, Pawan Sinha has worked out a provocative theory that might help explain these anecdotes: people with autism have trouble with 'temporal integration', or drawing upon information learned in the past to anticipate the future.The basic idea is that meaningful social interactions — which are difficult for people with autism — hinge on precisely synchronized events. For example, to understand spoken language, you must quickly and seamlessly integrate sounds to form meaningful words: myoo plus zik becomes music, not muse, use or sick. Similarly, imagine how difficult it would be to have a party conversation if you couldn't monitor, in real time, your companion's facial expressions or gestures in response to your words.In between setting world records, carrying out vision experiments on his infant son, and launching a campaign to build a large eye hospital in New Delhi, Sinha has led an effort to test about 40 children with autism on a variety of visual and auditory experiments. Preliminary data from his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) show that these children do have deficits in temporal integration."We know that motion plays a crucial boot-strapping role in vision, and motion processing has been shown to be deficient in autism," Sinha says. "Our working hypothesis is that autism might, at least in part, be the manifestation of difficulties in processing dynamic information."Read more at...SFARI, June 2010.