Spectrum: Autism Research News

Robert Schultz hopes to use technology to change how autism is studied, diagnosed and treated.

Pupil response suggests autistic people have atypical activity in a part of the brain that regulates attention.

Locked out of labs during the coronavirus pandemic, scientists are moving their investigations to virtual and online formats, a shift that may bring lasting changes to autism research.

Children who have autistic older siblings have bigger neural responses than controls do in the brain networks that process faces.

Areas of the brain involved in processing vision are more weakly connected to those that process sensory information in autistic children than in controls.

Mice missing an autism gene called SHANK3 tend to be hypersensitive to touch, which may stem from underactivity of neurons that normally dampen sensory responses.

As the coronavirus pandemic disrupts researchers’ working lives, the academic journals that publish their work are adjusting too.

Autism prevalence in the United States continues to rise, according to a new study of 8-year-old children in 11 states. Boys are 4.3 times as likely as girls are to have autism, a ratio that is consistent with previous estimates.

Researchers are using machine learning to improve diagnostic predictions of autism, create interactive support robots, and more.

Researchers have cataloged more than 100 mutations in DDX3X, a candidate gene for autism.