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The current “autism spectrum” DSM 5 diagnostic criteria and autism standardized diagnostic instruments promote considerable heterogeneity or clinical indecision and may be detrimental to the advancement of fundamental research on autism mechanisms. To increase clinical specificity and reorient research towards core autistic presentations, we propose new diagnostic criteria for prototypical autism during the age of 2- to 5-years. We include autism within other non-dominant, familiarly aggregated phenomena sharing asymmetrical developmental bifurcations, such as twin pregnancy, left handedness, and breech presentation/delivery. Following this model, nature, trajectory, and positive/negative signs structure of autism would result from the polarized problem of whether or not language and information is processed in a socially biased manner. Prototypical autism would follow a canonical developmental trajectory by which a gradual decline in social bias in the processing of incoming information, overtly beginning at the end of the first year, bifurcates into a prototypical autistic presentation in the second half of the second year of life. This bifurcation event is followed by a plateau, in which these atypicalities show maximal stringency and distinctiveness, and then ultimately, in most cases, by partial normalization. During the plateau period, the orientation towards, and processing of, information is considerably modified, with an absence of bias for social information, contrasting with a high level of interest in complex, unbiased information, independently of its social or non-social nature. Integrating autism into asymmetrical developmental bifurcations would explain the absence of deleterious neurological and genetic markers and the presence of familial transmission in canonical autistic presentations.

Propaganda frequently leverages themes of dirtiness and disease to foster negative attitudes toward marginalized social groups. Although history suggests that this tactic is highly successful, empirical evidence is required to evaluate propaganda's potential efficacy. Inspired by previous evidence that children rapidly form attitudes about social groups, we conducted an exploratory investigation into whether 5- to 9-year-olds' (N = 48) judgments of novel foreign groups could be swayed by visually depicting one of these groups as disgusting in poster-sized illustrations. Across a wide battery of tasks, there was no clear indication that children readily internalize messages from propaganda in evaluating members of novel social groups. This finding held regardless of the type of disgustingness that was depicted in the propaganda, and generalized across the age range we investigated. Overall, our results are encouraging in a practical sense, suggesting that children are not easily swayed by negative misrepresentations of immigrants in propaganda.