Monotropism

Monotropism, a typical feature of autism, is when an individual has a restricted range of interests and can only pay attention to what is in his or her attention tunnel. This hypothesis was published in 2005 and was developed by Dinah Murray, a Doctor of Philosophy; Mike Lesser, a mathematician; and Wendy Lawson, a social worker; and regards attention-tunnels as the central feature of autism. Monotropic individuals tend to become too focused on a certain object or activity and find difficulty in shifting their attention, whereas a polytropic individual is capable of spreading his or her attention to multiple things at one time. Monotropic individuals often display stereotypies which occur because the individual focuses his or her attention on one thing, and repeats it until the attention moves. It is also related to monoprocessing, which is defined as the ability to only process information from one source at a time. This is a way to cope with their hypersensitivity to sensory information.