Adults with autism have regional differences in brain volume in areas that play a role in social behavior and communication compared with controls, according to a large study published in the February issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. The differences correlate with the severity of autism symptoms, the study also shows.

A detailed brain imaging study of people with Williams syndrome, a developmental disorder characterized by a highly sociable personality, has found a series of structural, functional and connectivity deficits that converge on a part of the brain called the insula. The findings were published online 12 March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Children with autism activate more brain regions than controls do when listening to tonal inflections in speech that convey meaning. The findings were published 19 December in Child Neuropsychology.

Researchers have developed functional magnetic imaging devices that are optimized to fit children’s heads, according to a study published in the December issue of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. These tools increase the quality of the data and deter head motion, which research suggests can lead to spurious results.

Brain imaging studies of people with autism show that specific areas respond more strongly to song than do those of controls. The opposite is true when listening to speech.

The development of white matter tracts, the nerve bundles that join one brain region to another, is different in babies who go on to develop autism compared with those who do not, according to a study published 17 February in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Brain imaging can detect acute sensitivity to sound in individuals with autism, according to a study published 25 January in Neurophysiology.

A new website invites the public to help map the ‘connectome,’ the pattern of connections among all the neurons in our brain.

Structural connections in the brain’s face-processing region can be used to predict brain activity in response to faces, according to research published this month in Nature Neuroscience.

The results of two new studies support recommendations against the use of brain scans to diagnose autism.