Oxytocin, the infamous ‘love hormone,’ may attune the brains of people with autism to respond to social information such as facial expressions, researchers reported 2 December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study boosts oxytocin’s promise for treating the social deficits seen in autism.

Conventional wisdom about how men and women process images of faces may be wrong, with significant implications for autism research, suggests an analysis of unpublished brain imaging data presented at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

People are unconsciously alert to what’s going on in the minds of others, and this activity can be traced to two specific regions of the brain, according to unpublished results presented Sunday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

Two studies published in the past few months suggest that face-processing deficits in people with autism are complex and may depend on the task.

Pivotal response training, a form of behavioral therapy for autism, alters brain activity in children with the disorder, normalizing it in some regions and triggering compensatory activity in others, according to a small study. The unpublished results were presented Wednesday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in San Sebastián, Spain.

Three new approaches to brain imaging, presented Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in New Orleans, allow researchers to probe how the brain responds to social situations.

A distinct region of the social brain is activated when viewing interactions between two people, according to unpublished research presented Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in New Orleans.

Researchers have charted the normal development of what’s known as the social brain from childhood to young adulthood, according to research presented Sunday at the 2012 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in New Orleans.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have for the first time identified brain regions activated by joint attention, the process in which two people direct their attention to the same object, person or topic of conversation. The findings appeared 16 April in Human Brain Mapping.

Social cognition tests using videos of actors performing emotional expressions and scenes can measure subtle impairments characteristic of high-functioning people with autism, according to unpublished research presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.