When people with autism consider scenarios that require them to infer others’ thoughts and beliefs, scans show no difference between their brain activation and that of controls, according to a study published 20 September in PLoS One.

Pairing brain imaging with simple videos that mimic social interactions can help pinpoint the brain regions responsible for inferring others’ thoughts. Researchers described this approach Sunday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

People are unconsciously alert to what’s going on in the minds of others, and this activity can be traced to two specific regions of the brain, according to unpublished results presented Sunday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

People with anorexia or bulimia have more traits of autism than do those in the general population, according to a study published 31 July in Molecular Autism.

With the right incentive, such as winning a prize, children with autism do fairly well at inferring the thoughts and beliefs of others, according to a study published in the May issue of Developmental Science.

There is little to fear in the definition of autism in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and a lot to recommend it, says Simon Baron-Cohen.

A handful of long-term studies, each including up to several hundred participants, have followed people with autism for close to two decades. As the children in some of these studies come of age, researchers are piecing together the disorder’s trajectories.

A rare birth defect offers a unique perspective on the connectivity theory of autism. Up to one-third of those missing all or part of the corpus callosum, a thick tract of nerve fibers connecting the left and right brain hemispheres, meet the diagnostic criteria for autism, several recent studies suggest.

People with autism, unlike controls, do not show distinct patterns of brain activity when evaluating scenarios that require them to infer others’ thoughts, according to two studies published in the past two months.

Husband and wife research team Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl have shown that learning is a fundamentally social process, beginning in early infancy.