Infants who are later diagnosed with autism are less attentive to the presence of a person onscreen at 6 months of age than their typically developing peers are, according to a study published 14 January in Biological Psychiatry.

Problems with eye movements in people with autism are part of their motor difficulties and may contribute to the social deficits characteristic of the disorder, according to unpublished research presented last week at the Salk Institute, Fondation IPSEN and Nature Symposium on Biological Complexity in La Jolla, California.

Because infants born into families with autism are more likely to develop the condition, studying them might lead to ways to diagnose people in the general population earlier.

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

Family members of individuals with autism process faces and scenes differently than do controls, according to two new studies, one of them published in October. This suggests that visual processing may be an autism endophenotype — a measurable symptom that represents part of the genetic risk of a disorder.

People with autism don’t look at others’ eyes or mimic their actions in everyday life, but they can do these things when asked to, according a review published 7 September in Brain and Development. 

Sophisticated eye-tracking tools and other technologies are making it easier to record and analyze social interactions, and may help researchers study social deficits in children with autism. Researchers debuted some of these tools 28 September at the Engineering and Autism conference in Los Angeles.

Sensory responses in the brain of an individual with autism vary much more than in someone without the disorder, according to a study published 20 September in Neuron. This may explain why some people with autism are extremely sensitive to lights and sounds.

Some studies have suggested that people with autism have deficits in executive function — a set of complex mental processes involved in everyday life. But these results may instead reflect their difficulties imagining what other people are thinking, according to a provocative new hypothesis.

Infants at high risk for autism have difficulty integrating information from different senses, such as vision and hearing, a new study suggests.