The wobbly handwriting of many children with autism may reflect differences in their brains’ motor and working memory systems, according to a poster presented Monday at the 2012 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in New Orleans.
Sophisticated eye-tracking tools and other technologies are making it easier to record and analyze social interactions, and may help researchers study social deficits in children with autism. Researchers debuted some of these tools 28 September at the Engineering and Autism conference in Los Angeles.
Sensory responses in the brain of an individual with autism vary much more than in someone without the disorder, according to a study published 20 September in Neuron. This may explain why some people with autism are extremely sensitive to lights and sounds.
Studying the well-characterized Williams syndrome could help researchers understand autism and discover new therapeutic targets, says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg.
A new approach allows researchers to visualize individual neurons in the small, clear brains of larval zebrafish as they interact with their surroundings, according to a study published 9 May in Nature.
Infants at high risk for autism have difficulty integrating information from different senses, such as vision and hearing, a new study suggests.
Two studies published over the past month followed individuals with autism at various ages and showed that they gain developmental skills differently than controls do.
Warning signs of autism, such as deficits in social ability and fine motor skills, are apparent as early as 6 months of age, according to a large longitudinal study published in the March issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Two large-scale neuroscience projects aim to integrate many different types of information about the brain into cohesive models and to share resources with the research community.
Two genes may be responsible for autism symptoms in mice with extra copies of the Rett syndrome gene, according to a study published 8 January in Nature Genetics.