Research into the ability of children with autism to imitate has produced contradictory results: Some studies find that those with the disorder have difficulty imitating people, whereas others find no problems. A new study explores why.

Charles Nelson, who famously showed that social deprivation damages the developing brain, is analyzing brain waves in babies to study how different genetic risk factors might lead to autism.

Researchers have linked the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions to MET, a well-known autism gene, according to a study published 27 April in PLoS ONE.

Men with a common autism-linked variant of CD38, a gene that regulates levels of the ‘trust hormone’ oxytocin, benefit more from the hormone than do those with other variants, according to a study published in the May issue of Neuropsychopharmacology.

The brains of individuals with autism have higher-than-typical levels of the precursor to a neuronal growth factor called BDNF, according to a study published in the April issue of the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology. The results suggest a mechanism for altered brain development in autism.

Social impairments in autism are likely a consequence of deficits in social motivation that start early in life and have profound developmental consequences, says psychologist Robert Schultz.

Children with autism who have different verbal and intellectual abilities seem to glean useful social information from different parts of the face, according to the largest-ever eye-tracking study of the disorder. The findings are published in the March issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Engineers have debuted several new robots to help children with autism, including a boy that can sense when it’s touched, a female head that expresses a wide range of emotions and a low-cost fuzzy penguin that can track a child’s eye movements.

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.

A longitudinal study of infant siblings of children with autism is the first to identify a particular brain pattern that is linked to later diagnosis of autism.