Girls who score high on a test that assesses symptoms of eating disorders have many features of autism.

Individuals with autism struggle to switch their attention between sounds and pictures, and are less likely than controls to be distracted by a face, according to two studies published this summer.

The brains of teenagers with autism and their unaffected siblings respond similarly to both happy and neutral faces, whereas those of controls seem to prefer happy ones, according to a study published 12 July in Translational Psychiatry.

Unlike typical controls, adults with autism do not synchronize their eye blinks with those of other people, according to a study published in the July issue of Neuropsychologia.

Infants with fragile X syndrome spend more time looking at a toy before switching their attention elsewhere than do healthy controls, according to a study published 1 July in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Studying the infant siblings of children who have autism to identify early signs of the disorder is expected to have enormous impact on the field from a clinical and a basic science standpoint, says psychologist Karen Dobkins.

Adults with autism get better at recognizing faces after they are trained to observe faces as a whole, instead of focusing on individual features, according to a study published 12 April in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Children with autism who participate in a specialized drama program show improvements in face identification and theory of mind, the ability to infer what others are thinking, according to a study published in the April issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

At 12 months of age, infant siblings of children with autism have a brain response to unfamiliar faces that is characteristic of typical children at a younger age, according to a study published 26 March in Brain Topography. This developmental delay could be used as an early biomarker for autism.

Individuals with autism use more brainpower in regions linked to visual perception, and less in those related to planning thoughts and actions, compared with healthy controls, according to a multi-study analysis published today in Human Brain Mapping.