Husband and wife research team Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl have shown that learning is a fundamentally social process, beginning in early infancy.

Researchers can share and compare brain-imaging data on the UCLA Multimodal Connectivity Database, described in the 28 November Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. The resource builds connectivity matrices, which estimate the strength of connections between regions of the brain.

Microglia, brain cells that are part of the immune system, are more activated in the brains of young men with autism than in controls, according to an imaging study published 26 November in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

The motor cortex of children with autism is wired differently than that of typically developing children, reports a study published 22 October in Human Brain Mapping.

Young boys with fragile X syndrome or autism have larger brains overall than controls do, but the two groups show enlargement of different parts of the brain, according to an imaging study published in September in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Several studies in the past two years have claimed that brain scans can diagnose autism, but this assertion is deeply flawed, says Nicholas Lange.

Head movement can bias brain imaging results, undermining a leading theory on the cause of autism, say Ben Deen and Kevin Pelphrey.

Heavier newborns have larger brains later in life, and a larger cerebral cortex — the brain region responsible for high-level functions such as consciousness and language. The findings, published 19 November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the first to assess birth weight’s connection to brain development.

‘Hyperscanning,’ a set of techniques for simultaneously measuring brain activity in two people, is yielding insights into autism.

Our coverage of the 2012 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting ran the gamut from feral monkeys to the language of mice and new treatments for fragile X syndrome.