But it's uncomfortably deep into "what I want to believe territory". It tries to make a deficit into the hypertrophy of an otherwise positive trait--not poverty, it's an overabundance. Instead of a failure to develop something, it turns into a response that perhaps can be damped or moderated, and it's a source of hope.

Whenever I run into a claim that I want to believe, my first impulse is to stop and remind myself about confirmation bias and the need to be especially critical about things I want to believe. I need to slow down and be careful because partial, skewed, and misrepresented facts are easy to swallow in that case; and it's easy to overlook counterevidence or fail to appreciate it when it's offered. Even worse, the more I want to believe the less I notice gaps in the evidence, information that should be offered but isn't. The more I don't examine sources to see if the sources are presented clearly. The more I want to believe it, the more I need to slow down.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." That is the heart and soul of any reasonable definition of 'critical thinking.' It's why so much social science is like crap vodka: Take shit, ferment it, then distill it, and slap "Stolichnaya" on it. The researchers and reviewers want to believe. Fervently. Fermentedly, when all else fails. Because their research will help people, and many go into the social sciences to improve society, help people, help kids.

So I'm going to run to what looks like counterevidence. Take for example the earliest way to identify autism in young children. Even before a lot of the vaccinations are given that some view as the cause or trigger for autism, you can ID autism. The mothers themselves still have no clue at this stage. You use an eye tracker on the little tykes. You look at what they pay attention to in real time. This is handy with adults--in identifying language processing, in designing web pages for efficiency and clarity, in examining how we read and even in training law enforcement personnel. You literally track what their eyes are looking at, which tells you what the brain guiding them wants to look at. You see how long the brain pauses on an object, you see when it reverts to a previous topic as the eyes move back to that object or word or image. You can track how often and how long males and females at ages 16, 21, 35, 60, and 80 years look at a woman's face, eyes, lips, breasts, hair, jewelry, or look past her at something else. If the brain's interested in something and it's there to be seen or inferred, barring any taboo your eyes look there (and even with a taboo, your eyes still tend to look there, but differently). You may not know what the brains are thinking, but you have a good idea what they're thinking about.

Things like object permanence stand out in early childhood psychology. And you can watch it develop in young children. You put an object of interest behind a screen and at one age kids tune out almost at once. If somebody sneaks the object out (say, through a hole in the wall behind the screen) and then lifts the screen, the kid glances and sees nothing of interest so her eyes move on. Later--perhaps a week, perhaps a month--you put the object behind the screen and the kid watches the screen. Will the object come out again? The kid knows it's still there and waits for it. When the kid loses patience in waiting and you raise the screen, she often looks back because that object, she knows, is still there and she wanted to look at it some more. But if you raise the screen after removing the object the kid just stares. The object of interest was there. It's not now. There's a mystery. And that's really interesting. Early childhood psychologists like eye tracking.

So after watching what a lot of kids at a certain age do, you find that they all tend to have the same interests, overall. Sometimes they took at toys. Sometimes they look at doorknobs. Sometimes they look at the faces of strangers. Sometimes they look at familiar faces. They look at moving objects and complex mechanical objects, at animals and dolls. You keep track of how often and for how long kids look at things and look at what the steaming pile of data you get at the end. It's never the case that a kid only looks at faces or only look at doorknobs; only looks at dolls or only looks at complex mechanical objects. There's some personal variation over time, and whatever group the kid falls into there's variation in the group. But the stats come back clear as a bell, and consistent across time and geography.

Overall, small children like bright objects, moving objects. They like looking at new objects. They've never seen a firetruck? Doesn't matter who they are, they'll look at the firetruck. Esp. if it's bright, moving, making a sound. But they eventually bore and start looking around again. How long does it take to get bored? That varies. They also tend to find it interesting when familiar things do unfamiliar things, when expectations are (safely) violated.

For boys and girls there's a clear difference in what they look at. At 4-6 months of age (0;4 to 0;6) overall boys will spend more time looking at more complicated mechanical objects and moving objects and be less quickly bored. They'll be more quickly bored looking at a never-before-seen doll and go back to looking at a familiar but complex or moving mechanical thing. Girls pattern the opposite way, most often preferring to look at dolls and animals and quickly bored with looking at some mechanical contraption. Oddly, that tends to be what a lot of people say kids are only later socialized into liking. I say "oddly" because at 0;4 they've only just learned to focus and start to make sense of their environment. You need to get to pretty extreme theories of socialization to say that a month after a kid's started to focus and months before she's managed to put the first sound string to a referent (i.e., gotten her first "word&quot she's already well enough aware of the complex social environment and stereotypes around her to have been thoroughly conditioned into sex stereotypes. Yet they're still at the age when they have to be kept away from a lot of things because they'll as soon pick up a dead bug or a cat turd and put it in their mouths as a pacifier or a piece of candy.

Accepting "extreme socialization" as an explanation requires a lot of "I want to believe." (Which, exceptionally, was overridden when in-utero testosterone levels were compared with early childhood interests with later sexual orientation. Then there are clearly biologically determined interests because "I want to believe" pushed towards an organic, developmental, non-voluntary origin for gender and sexual orientation differences.)

One thing at 0;6 usually uniting babies psychologically is that whether boy or girl, whether they prefer dolls to trucks or trucks to dolls, there's a strong commonality: The big distinction is between human(like) face and non-face. Boys may like faces a bit less than girls, but both spend an inordinate amount of time examining faces. Mommy's face. Daddy's face. Stranger's faces. Faces on toys. Minimalist faces that consist of a few straight lines and dots or little circles for eyes. Deadpan faces, smiling faces, sad faces, angry faces. The world is divided clearly into faces and non-faces. Even if at that age they're not clear in their response to a sad face versus an angry face and it just generally upsets them, they focus on them. There's one group that isn't united, though.

Kids well along on the spectrum. The degree they fail to make the face/non-face distinction matches up very nicely with the severity of later diagnoses. At age 0;6, kids with fairly severe autism at age 3 or 4 don't routinely recognize faces as faces, or if they do they don't show it. Happy, sad, artificial or natural, even Mommy's, a face is a doorknob is a doll is a cat is a car is a shoe is a star is a rainbow. Less extreme diagnoses at age 3 match up with sort of privileging faces at 0;6, but perhaps not distinguishing mommy from Nurse Jenny, or only looking at faces 30% less often than kids who turn out to be normal. If you're "normal" you are face-centric at that age. If you're autistic, you're not. And the degree to which you don't make the distinction tracks neatly with the severity of the diagnosis later.

Lack of focusing on mommy's face was noticeable a long time back, BTW. Most mothers try to ignore it and the "I want to believe" impulse kicks in. I must not fool myself--and I am the easiest person for me to fool.

Do we really want to say that by age 0;6 some kids are already overwhelmed by feelings of emotional intensity? So much so that they've tuned out not just mad or happy faces, but stopped recognizing faces at all, however deadpan or stylized? Without ever going through a "I recognize faces" stage? That truly would be exceptional. And exceptional claims require exceptional proof. Or just faith.

It'd be interesting to see how what's almost certainly a deficit gets transformed into virtuous hypersensitivity.

On your very serious "I want to believe syndrome. It'd be interesting to see how what's almost certainly a deficit gets transformed into virtuous hypersensitivity ": perhaps you are correct, perhaps not, the science is not there yet.

In my youth, I was considered shy, withdrawn, and I had a photographic memory. I would not be so quick to dismiss "hypersensitivity". From the age of 4, my first memories, I knew people thought there was something "different" about me. In reality, we are all different, that's what I find a marvel to behold.

or anxiety attack except a hypersensitive reaction confronting a world that seems way too intense? Is it or is it not the case that learning or all sorts including social learning breaks down when one is overwhelmed? Do not most people on the Spectrum report experiencing a lot of anxiety and a great deal of worrying? Would not hypersensitivity be the most plausible explanation for much of this anxiety and worry? Is not repetitive behavior or "stemming" as well as regular escapes into "one's own world" the most natural response of a hypersensitive person choosing to retreat to one's own world as an avoidance of a world that is simply too intense to confront?

Let's take the issue of eye contact that most people on the Spectrum have difficulty with. Why do most people on the Spectrum avoid contact but for a hypersensitivity to an otherwise normal experience?

This from the article:

Do You See What I See?

One other indicator of hypersensitivity is staring us in the face, literally. Autistic individuals seem to perceive less in facial expressions than nonautistic individuals, and the part of the brain that is partial to faces, the fusiform face area, responds less well in autistic folks. The first-pass (and most popular) interpretation of these findings: autistic people can’t read faces because their neural face area is poorly developed. A research team in Pittsburgh scanned Temple Grandin while she was watching pictures of faces and nonface scenes and found exactly this result. Grandin described her experience in the scanner while lecturing at UC Davis’s MIND institute in 2008 (CAPS indicate emphasis in Grandin’s phrasing):


Now [researcher] Nancy Minshew did another brain scan and she found I was more interested in THINGS than I was in looking at pictures of people. . . . She starts showing me all these weird videos of people, airplanes flying over the Grand Canyon, bridges and apples and all kinds of objects. And I’m looking at this [thinking] where did she get this 1970s video? How many copyright violations do we have on this video? Why was I looking at the THINGS? Because the THINGS told me more information about where the tapes came from. And I was trying to figure out what the experiment was all about.

If all you did was analyze the brain scans it would look like Grandin’s face area is dysfunctional. But, it is clear from her recounting of the experience that she was attending more to the nonface pictures, which could easily produce the observed results even if her fusiform face area (FFA) were perfectly normal (attention modulates the neural response). You are wondering whether the reason why she was more attentive to the nonface pictures is because her face area is dysfunctional in the first place. It’s possible, and it is the standard explanation of both the brain response pattern and Grandin’s behavior, which is more object- than face-oriented. It’s not the only possibility, though! It could be, for example, that her FFA is hyperreactive, which leads her to avoid attending to faces, which results in more attention paid to nonface objects, which leads to the observed imaging result. Or maybe she’s just smart enough to recognize that the THINGS tell you more information, as she noted, in the context of the problem she had tasked herself with during the study, to figure out the goals of the experiment.

At least one study has confirmed that alternative explanations of the face processing “dysfunctions” in autism may be on the right track. Autistic and nonautistic individuals were scanned using fMRI while they looked at pictures of faces that were either emotionally neutral or emotionally charged. Crucially, using eye-tracking technology, the researchers also monitored which parts of the images their participants were looking at during the experiment. Overall, autistic participants activated their fusiform face region less vigorously than nonautistic controls, replicating previous work. But the eye-tracking data showed that this was simply because they spent less time looking at the most informative region of the faces, the eyes. In fact, when the researchers looked at fusiform activation as a function of time spent fixating on the eyes in the photos, they found a strong positive correlation in the autistic group. This means that the autistic brain is responding quite well to face stimuli, if one takes into account the amount of time spent looking at them.

Again we might ask the same question we asked previously, why aren’t autistic individuals looking at the most informative region of a face in the first place? If it’s not a general face processing deficit, maybe it is a facial emotion processing deficit that limits their ability to detect information in the eyes. According to this view, the face processing system in general is working OK, reflected by the activation in the FFA when autistics actually look at faces, but because autistic people can’t process the emotion in them, they don’t spend as much time looking at the critical regions compared to controls. As before, this is a possible interpretation. But again, it’s not the only interpretation. An alternative is that autistics don’t look at the eyes as much because of a hyperactive response to emotional information, which is particularly evident in the eyes. And consistent with this alternative possibility, the same study reported that amygdala activation was stronger in the autistic compared to the nonautistic group while looking at faces.

Also consistent with the alternative, emotional hyperreactivity hypothesis are statements from autistic individuals themselves. Here’s a sample gleaned from a paper covering face processing in autism: It’s painful for me to look at other people’s faces. Other people’s eyes and mouths are especially hard for me to look at.

My lack of eye contact sometimes makes people, especially my teachers and professors, think that I’m not paying attention to them.

—Matthew Ward, student, University of Wisconsin

Eyes are very intense and show emotions. It can feel creepy to be searched with the eyes. Some autistic people don’t even look at the eyes of actors or news reporters on television.

—Jasmine Lee O’Neill, author

For all my life, my brothers and everyone up ’til very recently, have been trying to make me look at them straight in the face. And that is about the hardest thing that I, as an autistic person, can do, because it’s like hypnosis. And you’re looking at each other square in the eye, and it’s very draining.

—Lars Perner, professor, San Diego State University

These are revealing statements for two reasons. First, they provide a clear indication of an intact theory of mind in these individuals (“my lack of eye contact . . . makes people . . . think that . . .”). And second, active avoidance of eye contact provides just as much evidence for sensitivity to the information contained therein as does active engagement of eye contact. If you can’t recognize that there is information in the eyes, why avoid them?

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/01/we_might_have_autism_backwards_what_broken_mirror_and_broken_mentalizing_theories_could_have_wrong/