‘Mind blindness’ affects moral reasoning in autism
High-functioning adults with autism pass false belief tests with ease, but struggle with moral judgment in real-life situations.
High-functioning adults with autism pass false belief tests with ease, but struggle with moral judgment in real-life situations.
A new technique allows researchers to watch the long-term effects of disease on the brain, according to a study published in the February Nature Medicine. The approach could help scientists study changes in the brain that result from neurological disorders such as autism.
Two new studies of families carrying glitches on a region of chromosome 16, which has been strongly associated with autism, reveal the wide range of effects caused by the variant and narrow the list of possible culprit genes.
The National Institutes of Health is adding a new $1 billion institute for early-stage drug development. But the agency’s plan to fund it by closing the National Center for Research Resources is causing some consternation.
Children with autism show abnormally strong synchrony between deep and outer layers of the brain, according to a study published online 31 December in Biological Psychiatry.
The brains of people with autism show three distinct periods of abnormal development — overgrowth in infancy, prematurely arrested growth in childhood, and shrinking between adolescence and middle age — according to a study in Brain Research.
Using tricks of genetic engineering, researchers in Taiwan have created the first comprehensive map of the myriad neuronal connections in the fruit fly brain. The findings appeared 11 January in Current Biology.
Using tricks of genetic engineering, researchers in Taiwan have created the first comprehensive map of the myriad neuronal connections in the fruit fly brain. The findings appeared 11 January in Current Biology.
The goal of studying siblings of children with autism is to identify an early diagnostic marker for the disorder. What researchers are finding instead are distinct traits shared by family members who remain healthy.
Over the next five years, dozens of researchers funded by the $40 million ‘NIH Human Connectome Project’ will map the circuits of the human brain, tracing neural pathways and learning how different regions work together in synchrony.