Balkenius, C., and Björne, P. (2004). First steps towards a computational theory of autism. In Procedings of EpiRob '04. [PDF]
A computational model with three interacting components for context sensitive Q-learning, context processing and automation can autonomously learn a focus attention and a shift attention task. The performance of the model is similar to that of normal children, and when a single parameter is changed, the performance on the two tasks approaches that of autistic children. The results of the simulations are consistent with a cerebellar theory of autism.