There should be more research on sensory sensitivity in autism, which severely affects quality of life, says bestselling author and animal scientist Temple Grandin.

Individuals with autism struggle to switch their attention between sounds and pictures, and are less likely than controls to be distracted by a face, according to two studies published this summer.

A new study shows that women with high-functioning autism appear better able to camouflage their symptoms, perhaps because they are more self-aware than men with the disorder.

Sensory sensitivity is one of the most understudied aspects of autism. That’s a serious problem, because it underlies much of the distress experienced by people with the disorder, says best-selling author and animal scientist Temple Grandin.

Autism is diagnosed based on the severity and variety of its symptoms. This makes it very difficult to diagnose and easy to confuse with other disorders, such as language delay and intellectual disability, cautions Isabelle Rapin.

The ‘intense world theory’ says autism stems from hyper-sensitive reactions to the world, allowing the individual to zoom in on tiny details, but ignore the bigger picture.

The parts of the brain that help us pay attention to some things and not others have specialized regions for different senses, such as sight and sound, according to a paper published online in November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

People with autism have structural differences in the temporal cortex — a brain region involved in sound and language processing — compared with controls, according to a postmortem study presented Monday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

Individuals with autism have trouble perceiving the passage of time, and pairing sights and sounds that happen simultaneously, according to two new studies.

Mouse models of fragile X syndrome show defects in two kinds of potassium channels — ubiquitous pores that control the flow of electrical current across neurons — in a brain area that processes sound, according to two papers published this summer.