Scientists are analyzing more than 7,000 studies of functional magnetic resonance imaging to refine the role of various regions in the brain, according to unpublished work presented Monday at the 2011 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

After analyzing the brains and behaviors of mutant mice and screening genes in people with autism, researchers have pinpointed what they say is a new autism candidate gene: PRICKLE2. The unpublished work was presented Thursday in Washington, D.C.

A drug in trials for treating autism-related disorders can reverse memory problems and anxiety in adult mice lacking the schizophrenia gene DISC1 in some cells. The unpublished results were presented yesterday in Washington, D.C.

Memory is a notoriously unreliable guide, and this is especially true when strong emotions are involved. So it’s not surprising that parents of children with autism tend to recall the exact onset of their child’s symptoms with something less than accuracy.

Teenage boys with Asperger syndrome with higher-than-average scores on tests of abstract reasoning fare worse than controls on short-term memory and ability to filter out distractions.

A powerful cell that dampens electrical signaling in the brain could help unravel the disrupted brain wiring seen in people with autism, according to results presented yesterday at the Wiring the Brain meeting in Ireland.

Disrupted-in-schizophrenia 1, or DISC1— a protein associated with both autism and schizophrenia — is involved in the transport of mitochondria, the power-houses of the cell, to their correct locations in neurons, according to a study published in February in Molecular Psychiatry.

The brains of people with autism show three distinct periods of abnormal development — overgrowth in infancy, prematurely arrested growth in childhood, and shrinking between adolescence and middle age — according to a study in Brain Research.

The ‘intense world theory’ says autism stems from hyper-sensitive reactions to the world, allowing the individual to zoom in on tiny details, but ignore the bigger picture.

Over the next five years, dozens of researchers funded by the $40 million ‘NIH Human Connectome Project’ will map the circuits of the human brain, tracing neural pathways and learning how different regions work together in synchrony.