Autism’s direct cause? Failure of infant-mother eye contact in a complex adaptive system

This paper shows that an experimental hypothesis is plausible and merits testing. In brief the hypothesis is that autism begins with a failure in early learning and that changing the environment of early learning would dramatically change its incidence. Strong statistical evidence supporting this hypothesis was published by Waldman et al. (2008) but this evidence has largely been ignored, perhaps because it challenges prevalent beliefs about autism.\ud \ud This paper also suggests that the current epidemic of autism is serious enough, and intellectually mysterious enough, to merit attention from a wider community of cognitive scientists: new ideas are needed. A confirmation of this paper’s hypothesis would have interesting implications for cognitive science