Premature baby? ADHD? Autism? Generalized Anxiety Disorder? Deafness? Getting closer to figuring out a mystery. Definitely: INFERENCE problem. Specifically, generating / pulling inferences from stories (story comprehension). Finding a “central idea”. “What is the author’s intent?”
Narrowed down to hippocampus. In autism, attempting to generate inferences doesn’t stay within the left anterior hippocampus and language areas on the left side but goes into the Right “homolog” – the same area on the RIGHT SIDE of the brain that’s NOT geared up in the same way for language/inference processing so it’s working harder, more coarse, trying to grab as many POSSIBILITIES as possible in a short amount of time, taxing the limited energy to “think with”.
I saw similar things in cognitive development papers where children would use the right side for language processing as well as the left, but less and less until adulthood – and the preference for language processing is on the left side even as babies, but it shows less and less usage at 4 then 8, then 12, until not at all at 19.
Premature babies due to too little or too much oxygen can form neurons differently – robust, fast growth in some areas, but areas and connections that require slower development can suffer.
So, super smart babies and young children… but can get stuck.
“Mindblind”? Probably not. Read a thing where in autistic people inferring the FEELINGS of others comes first and sometimes only that but inferring concepts isn’t functioning due to different connection patterns (wiring).
Looked for the cogsci equivalent of “main idea” in text. There really isn’t one, not exactly. There is : Situation Model. So that I will now explore.