Autism’s core symptoms accompany a constellation of subtle signs that scientists are just beginning to unmask.
A monkey-sized jacket embedded with motion sensors — similar to technology used to animate creatures in movies — is helping researchers develop the common marmoset as a model for studying human social behavior.
Grunya Sukhareva characterized autism nearly two decades before Austrian doctors Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger. So why did the latter get all the credit?
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.
Mice with different genetic backgrounds have distinct behavioral profiles — and that may muddle findings from mouse research.
Babies eventually diagnosed with autism learn to detect speech sounds later than their typical peers do.
Tracking how roundworms crawl has enabled scientists to determine that many autism genes are involved in sensory processing and learning.
An autonomous robotic ‘rat’ may offer novel insights into the social responses of its warm-blooded counterparts.
Inhibiting the social hormone oxytocin alters the songs male zebra finches sing to attract females.
The pattern of high-pitched calls a mouse makes may reflect how, and how much, it is interacting with other mice. The pattern holds for typical mice as well as for two mouse models of autism.
