Autism as an impairment in detecting invariants

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show a variety of atypical behavioral and perceptual patterns which seem to lack a common underlying cause. We hypothesize that there may be a general impairment of the autistic brain characterized by a restriction on the class of connectivity patterns, i.e. features, that can be utilized for learning perceptual and cognitive tasks. In particular, we suggest that the autistic brain may not make proper use of features which pool information over larger areas of the input space, which would otherwise allow them to make use of symmetries and develop invariants to permutations.