Current research: Implication for the Asperger Community, a conference hosted by AANE in March presented quite a few speakers. The research that struck me as the most relevant to what I see in my practice was given by Nancy Kanwisher, Ph.D. Her presentation was called Attention in Autism: Different Preferences, Not Different Abilities. Her research was intriguing because it looked at attention in people with ASD. She found in her studies that it was not that people with ASD didn’t attend but that they had a lower preference to attend to the global. She found they were slower to engage on a face, and that they had difficulty keeping track of many things at once. So in other words people with autism are poor at multi-tasking social cues and social language, not because they can not, but because they aren’t wired to attend to multiple stimuli at the same time. Now the challenge is to apply this new information into my practice.