Monotropism

Monotropism is often described as "tunnel vision".

Monotropism is a person's tendency to focus their attention on a small number of interests at any time, tending to miss things outside of this attention tunnel. This cognitive strategy is posited to be the central underlying feature of autism. The theory of monotropism was developed by Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser starting in the 1990s, and first published in 2005. Lawson's further work on the theory formed the basis of his PhD, Single Attention and Associated Cognition in Autism, and book The Passionate Mind published in 2011.

A tendency to focus attention tightly has a number of psychological implications. While monotropism tends to cause people to miss things outside their attention tunnel, within it their focused attention can lend itself to intense experiences, deep thinking and flow states. However, this hyperfocus makes it harder to redirect attention, including starting and stopping tasks, leading to what is often described as executive dysfunction in autism, and stereotypies or perseveration where a person's attention is repeatedly pulled back to the same thing.

Monotropism has of 2018 been historically neglected, but has been seeing increased interest, despite a lack of competitor theories that explain all the features rather than just some features of autism and the fact it is relatively popular among autistic people themselves. This may be due in part to the field's historical tendency to ignore autistic narratives and experiences (which being internal are not readily outside accessible) and focus on experimental results done by non-autistic researchers, a tendency that is only recently been started to be corrected for as researchers pay more attention to autistic people's own accounts of themselves.

Characteristics

Typical classroom activity requires lot of polytropic processing of stimuli

Monotropic way of teaching can be greatly helpful for autistic students.

Monotropic and polytropic learning

Since the amount of attention available to a person is limited, cognitive processes are forced to compete. In the monotropic mind, interests that are active at any given time tend to consume most of the available attention, causing difficulty with tasks that demand a broad attention span, including conventional social interaction. Language development can be affected, both through the broad attention required and the psychological impact of language providing a tool for others to manipulate a child's interest system.

Monotropic individuals have trouble processing multiple things at once, particularly when it comes to multitasking while listening. For example, some have trouble taking notes in class while listening to a teacher, and may find it difficult to read a person's face and comprehend what they are saying simultaneously. A common tendency is for individuals to avoid complex sensory environments because of this hypersensitivity. A monotropic mind may suppress attention or focus on something else, or develop great depth in a given interest or skill rather than gaining breadth in an array of interests.

Implications for practice

To help autistic individuals in understanding and navigating the world, Murray et al. proposed in 2005 that certain steps could be helpful. These include:

• Increase connections with other people through the child's interests: 'start where the child is'.
• Allow them to pursue their own interests, and build understanding that way.
• Improve understanding in order to correct false or partial connections.
• Make tasks more attainable by decreasing the number and complexity of them.
• Make tasks and connections more meaningful.

See also

• Autism and memory

Further reading

• Lawson, Wenn (2011). The Passionate Mind: How People with Autism Learn. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ISBN 978-1-84905-121-7.
• Murray, Dinah (2021). "Monotropism: An Interest-Based Account of Autism". In Volkmar, Fred R. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders (2nd ed.). Springer. pp. 2954–2956. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91280-6_102269. ISBN 978-3-319-91279-0.
• Murray, Fergus (30 November 2018). "Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism". The Psychologist. The British Psychological Society.

External links

• monotropism.org Information portal on monotropism, including an archive of Dinah Murray's work on the subject