Autism as lack of neurological coordination
In explaining the theory, Marcel Just, one of the study’s lead authors and director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, compared the brain of a normal person to a sports team in which the members cooperate and coordinate their efforts. In an autistic person, though some “players” may be highly skilled, they do not work effectively as a team, thus impairing an autistic’s ability to complete broad intellectual tasks. Because this type of coordination is critical to complex thinking and social interaction, a wide range of behaviors are affected in autism.
The full text of the article is only available to subscribers, but the next entry in the same blog gives further information.
I don’t know if that happens to be a publication that I can access through my school’s library, but I’ll give it a try.