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Spectrum: Autism Research News

Tag: fMRI

April 2011

Space cadets

by  /  18 April 2011

People with autism are better able to visualize objects rotating in space — perhaps because their brains are wired differently than healthy controls.

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Brain activity explains keen visual skills in autism, group says

by  /  4 April 2011

Individuals with autism use more brainpower in regions linked to visual perception, and less in those related to planning thoughts and actions, compared with healthy controls, according to a multi-study analysis published today in Human Brain Mapping.

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December 2010

Risk gene for autism rewires the brain

by  /  1 December 2010

A variant of the autism risk gene CNTNAP2 may alter the brain to emphasize connections between nearby regions and diminish those between more distant ones, according to a study published 3 November in Science Translational Medicine.

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November 2010

Connections between language areas impaired in autism

by  /  17 November 2010

Important language areas in the brain don’t show the expected patterns of connectivity when people with autism listen to speech, suggests a poster presented Monday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

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People with autism assign negative emotions to photos

by  /  16 November 2010

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.

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September 2010

Ralph Adolphs: Setting the pace for cognitive research

by  /  9 September 2010

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.

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August 2010

Kevin Pelphrey: Charting the course of the social brain

by  /  17 August 2010

With robust training in developmental psychology and a techie’s fervor for new tools, Kevin Pelphrey is systematically investigating how the brain changes during development — starting in infants as young as 6 weeks old.

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July 2010

Social interactions not rewarding for children with autism

by  /  23 July 2010

Children with autism have abnormally low brain activity in the ‘reward center’ of the brain when given money or shown a happy face, according to a study in Autism Research. These are the first imaging data to support the notion that children with autism derive less pleasure from social interactions compared with their healthy peers.

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Imaging interactions

by  /  1 July 2010

A clever new method records brain activity during live, back-and-forth social interactions and could help scientists study joint attention — the act of looking at an object the same time someone else does.

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May 2010

Children with autism and siblings share brain ‘signature’

by  /  24 May 2010

Children who have autism and their healthy siblings share patterns of brain activity that are different than those seen in children with no family history of the disorder, according to unpublished research presented at the IMFAR 2010 conference in Philadelphia.

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