The brains of children with autism don’t tune out irrelevant sensory information, according to a brain imaging study presented Saturday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

Children with poor vision or a hearing loss are more likely to be diagnosed with autism than are those in the general population, reports a large epidemiological study published in October.

Tim Roberts knits together physics, medicine and technology to trace the origins of language processing problems in the brain, hoping to identify a telltale signature, or biomarker, for autism.

Clinicians should place children under age 5 who have developmental delay into a broad diagnostic category, called ESSENCE, which may then resolve into any number of individual diagnoses over time, says Christopher Gillberg. 

Some children with autism show unique patterns of brain activation while solving math problems, particularly in a brain region normally used for face processing, suggests a study published 15 August in Biological Psychiatry.

Children with autism tend to miss the facial cues that make yawning contagious, suggests a study published 22 July in Autism Research and Treatment.

A new method, described 5 June in Neuron, allows researchers to tag only those neurons that are active during the following 12-hour time window.

A new study looking at an auditory reflex raises important questions about whether autism is fundamentally a problem of high-level processing or something that arises from early disruptions in perceptual processing.
 

An ear muscle is more sensitive to loud sounds in children with autism than in controls, according to a study published 3 July in Autism Research. The researchers say this measure could serve as a clinical biomarker of the disorder, but others fiercely disagree.

Electronic health records may help researchers assemble information about autism, such as its full range of symptoms, from thousands of individuals, says Isaac Kohane.