Individuals with autism spend less time looking at eyes than at the mouth because they actively shift their gaze away from the eye region, according to a study published in September in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For nearly 20 years, Ralph Adolphs has been trying to figure out how the human amygdala works. An avid outdoorsman, Adolphs has run a dozen 50- and 100-mile races, and his colleagues say he approaches science with the same stamina and intensity. He has already published more than 100 scientific papers, several of them revealing intriguing ties between the amygdala and autism.

An imaging study widely interpreted as heralding a diagnostic brain scan for autism is more preliminary than popular media reports would indicate, according to experts familiar with the work.

Researchers have pinpointed the brain circuits that underlie the vasopressin hormone’s role in regulating emotions.

In between setting world records, carrying out vision experiments on his infant son, and launching a campaign to build a large eye hospital in New Delhi, Pawan Sinha is illuminating new facets of autism.

Charles Darwin performed what may be the world’s first study of how people interpret and understand the emotions of others, according to a paper published in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.

How interested a child with autism is in a social scene can be determined in the blink of an eye, according to research presented yesterday at IMFAR 2010.

Many parents of children with autism show some mild traits of the disorder. Research on this group — labeled with the ‘broad autism phenotype’, or BAP — suggests that the genetic underpinnings that lead to language or social problems can manifest in very different ways.

Toddlers with autism pay less attention to faces than do healthy controls, but both groups give equal attention to objects, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The findings challenge the idea that individuals with autism have a generalized problem with attention, suggesting instead that they struggle with attending specifically to social stimuli, researchers say.

At 6 months of age, babies who will later develop autism begin to lose some of their social skills and continue to regress until age 3, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.