Earl Miller never intended to study autism. He was planning to use monkeys to better understand how the brain learns categories and general concepts.

But 20 years ago as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Miller designed an experiment to teach a monkey how to recognize patterns: He rewarded the monkey whenever it recognized that two colors were the same. After a month, however, Miller discovered that the monkey hadn’t learned ‘matching’ at all. Instead, it had memorized each of the possible combinations of colors.

This looked a lot like the attention to detail that is a feature of autism, says Miller, now professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His lab studies how monkeys think as a model for identifying brain pathways that could go awry in people with various disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. 

Following a standing-room-only workshop at the 2011 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, Miller told SFARI.org that individuals with autism could have a disconnect between the brain regions that help in memorizing facts and those responsible for more abstract thoughts.