Is autism a sensitivity to outliers?

Autistic people are unusually sensitive to the unusual. Furthermore, their own behavior lacks spontaneous outliers. Autistic people stick to strict routines and their speech is flat and monotonous, or alternatively their behavior and speech is too variable but still lacks outliers. This absence may be what gives rise to an impression of “oddness”. In this paper, a model of sensitivity to outliers in terms of the alphastable family of distributions is developed. In particular the Gaussian distribution, which is sensitive to outliers, is contrasted with the Cauchy distribution, which is not. This is used to conjecture the origins of sensory hyper-sensitivities, hearing impairments in noisy environments, pedanticism, difficulty understanding metaphors, “weak central coherence”, unusual interests, impairments in understanding emotional cues, and communicative deficits. A simple random walk model of behavior is also developed, with autistic people characterized by an absence of spontaneous outlier steps.