How ‘social touch’ shapes autism traits
Autistic people have unusual responses to ‘affective touch,’ which conveys social and emotional information. Their responses may reveal how autism begins.
Autistic people have unusual responses to ‘affective touch,’ which conveys social and emotional information. Their responses may reveal how autism begins.
Children with mutations either in CHD8 — a top autism gene — or in genes that CHD8 controls share similar characteristics.
Autistic infants who have extreme responses to sights, sounds or textures tend to harm themselves as toddlers.
In autism, a person’s brain may not form accurate predictions of imminent experiences, or even if it does, sensory input may override those predictions.
Links between sensory and motor brain networks may be unusually weak in individuals with autism.
Autistic people have trouble making facial expressions appropriate to the circumstances.
Some children diagnosed with autism by age 2 show unusual responses to sights, sounds and textures as infants.
Stimulating the vagus nerve may normalize the brain response to sound in a rat model of Rett syndrome. It may also improve rats’ behavioral response to certain speech sounds.
Adding motor and sensory data boosts the accuracy of Research Domain Criteria — a broad research framework adopted by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health — for predicting autism.
Tracking how roundworms crawl has enabled scientists to determine that many autism genes are involved in sensory processing and learning.