Abstract
This chapter reviews the major neuropsychological theories of ASD from the last several decades, which we have sorted into the following categories: executive functioning, information processing, social motivation, and social cognition. We close with a section on emerging topics, relatively recent theories and models for which researchers are building empirical support, such as mirror neurons and their relevance to mimicry and imitation, animal models, and neural networks. Some of the theories discussed here are dealt with in more detail in specific chapters in this volume.