Psychological Theories of Autism: Everything, All at Once, In One Place

The goal of this work is to collect psychological causal theories of autism, to review them critically in terms of the strength of their constructs, premises and potential explanatory power, and to identify areas of engagement across theories. We have identified seven "families" of theories within the autism literature: low-level sensory-motor theories, arousal theories, complexity/abstraction/attention theories, predictive-coding theories, language theories, developmental theories and primary-social theories. The first five families are reviewed, and recommendations are made for strategic research planning.