Scientists zap anxiety circuit in mice
By shining a beam of light on a single brain circuit, researchers can compel mice to overcome their natural fears and boldly explore a new space, according to a study published 9 March in Nature.
By shining a beam of light on a single brain circuit, researchers can compel mice to overcome their natural fears and boldly explore a new space, according to a study published 9 March in Nature.
Several new studies challenge the ‘broken mirror’ hypothesis of autism, which suggests that defects in specialized brain cells called mirror neurons explain why people with the disorder find social interaction difficult.
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.
Relatives of individuals with autism recognize faces and emotions better than people with autism do, but not as well as typically developing controls do, according to a study published in December in Autism Research.
Teenagers with autism look at faces in pictures a little later than controls do, even when the faces are the most striking part of the image, according to a study published in November in Neuropsychologia. They are as likely as healthy controls to look at other prominent aspects of an image, however.
Children with autism are less interested in watching an activity, such as a parent and child putting together a puzzle, compared with typically developing controls, according to a study published in November in Brain Research.
People with autism take longer to decide whether emotionally ambiguous facial expressions are positive or negative — and are more likely than healthy controls to choose the latter, say researchers who reported their results in a poster Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego in San Diego.
A new brain imaging technique may provide a powerful tool for understanding social interaction, and how it is disrupted in conditions such as autism, according to a poster presented Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
Despite the impressive stories of people with autism being able to spot fine details, they are surprisingly susceptible to magic tricks, according to a study published in October in Psychological Science.