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Each of the attempts at diagnosis so far looked for features that would pick out autism as a separate syndrome. However, there are other interactions, which make this process even more difficult. Kanner had originally supposed that all children with autism were fundamentally intelligent and that apparent delays in development were a direct result of autistic condition. Sadly, this is one of the “facts” about autism that Kanner got wrong and Rainman-like autistic individuals are very rare indeed, even within the autistic population. Many individuals with autism have additional learning difficulties. In fact, the more severe the general learning difficulties the more likely it is that the person will have autism, although it becomes increasingly difficult to separate out the effects of autism from the effects of having profound learning difficulties.

Wing and Gould (1979) conducted research in Camberwell, looking at all the children referred for psychiatric help. They were able to select a group of these children who were socially impaired compared to others who had equally severe learning difficulties but without social impairment. They also found that three areas of development were associated with this social impairment, forming a cluster of features that provide diagnostic for autism.

Wing triad of impairments in autism

Social	Impaired, deviant and extremely delayed social development - especially interpersonal, development. The variation may be from "autistic aloofness" to "active but odd" characteristics.
Language and Communication	Impaired and deviant language and communication - verbal and non-verbal. Deviant semantic  and pragmatic aspects of language
Thought and Behaviour	Rigidity of thought and behaviour and impoverished social imagination. Ritualistic behaviour, reliance on routines, extreme delay or absence of "pretend play".

All the above behaviours should be out of keeping with the child’s mental age. Most people would also want to limit the diagnosis to conditions with an onset before 36 months of age, although Lorna Wing herself feels there may be late onset autism and this should be included in a broad view of the diagnosis of autism.

This became the triad of impairments by which autistic-like conditions were diagnosed. Some of these characteristics are out of keeping with Kanner’s original description and so children so diagnosed may not have what is known as Kanner’s syndrome but they do fall into what Wing (1988) has described as “The Autistic Continuum” and later “the Autistic Spectrum” (Wing1996). Wing based her broader classification on assuming that social effectiveness (or what Gillberg (1992) fells could best be seen as “empathy”) is normally distributed in the population with the majority having a medium level of social effectiveness or empathy and small minority at either end of the distribution. Presumably those at the high end are no problem, unless super-sensitivity to others can be seen as such. However at the low end there will be groupings of individuals where the boundaries of the groups are not set, but fade into one another – in effect forming a continuum. At the far end of the continuum will be the classically autistic group merging with some other groups such as those with Asperger’s syndrome who might merge with some other psychiatric disorders and/or with the “normal” group. The overlapping nature of these conditions and their variation on dimensions other than empathy suggests that a “spectrum” is better model of the condition than a “continuum”.

Rita Jordan (1999) - "Autistic Spectrum Disorders - An introductory Handbook for Practitioners", Great Britain: Cromwell Press Ltd