Understanding Autism From a Cross-Syndrome Developmental Perspective

Autism and the neurodevelopmental disability, Williams syndrome, have often been characterised at opposite ends of a neural and cognitive continuum in terms of their social and cognitive profiles, whereas in-depth analyses reveal many commonalities that emerge across their developmental trajectories. In this address, I will show how tracing domain-specific phenotypic outcomes back to their domain-relevant processes in the infant start states can help to identify the ways in which tiny initial impairments can cascade over developmental time to result in large developmental differences in the end state.