Subjected to Attention Shift Impairments and Familiarity Preference, Characteristics Studied in Autism

Autism is a developmental disorder with possibly multiple pathophysiologies. It has been theo-codes and representations. Cortical feature maps make it possible to classify stimuli, such as phonemes of speech, disregarding incidental detail. Hierarchies of such maps are instrumental in creating abstract codes and representations of objects and events. Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) are artificial neural networks that offer insights into the development of cortical feature maps. Attentional impairment is prevalent in autism, but whether it is caused by attention-shift impairment or strong familiarity preference or negative response to novelty is a matter of de-bate. We model attention shift during self-organization by presenting a SOM with stimuli from two sources in four different modes, namely, novelty seeking (regarded as normal learning), attention-shift impairment (shifts are made with a low probability), familiarity preference (shifts made with a lower probability to the source that is the less familiar to the SOM of the two sources), and familiarity preference in conjunction with attention-shift impairment. The resulting feature maps from learning with novelty seeking and with attention-shift impairment are much the same except that learning with attention-shift impairment often yield