In this month’s ASAT feature, Executive Director David Celiberti, PhD, BCBA-D, offer, OPs his thoughts on expanding autism awareness once April has ended. To learn more about ASAT, please visit their website at www.asatonline.org. You can also sign up for ASAT’s free newsletter, Science in Autism Tr…

More autistic voices than ever were represented at the national Autism Society Conference this summer. Self-advocates are stepping up and taking center stage to talk about their experiences and offer advice worth hearing and taking to heart. The Autism Society Conference does a great job at being in…

After reading John’s books and hearing him speak I could see him standing right next to me in the AMC lobby asking the same questions. By Ron Sandison On February 23rd, I had the pleasure of meeting a New York Times bestelling author, John Elder Robison, who is of my heroes from the autism community…

"It's sickening. People don't even talk to animals like that, and they're talking to nonverbal children who don't understand why they're talking to them like that. They're not doing anything wrong."Source: The Autism Site

ABA is Functional. Unique. Natural. Here’s a great process to create a FUN ABA goal: 1. ABA goals are functional. This means goals are chosen because they are of importance to the child and the child’s ability to be a part of the community. That is, within the family, school, at the groc…

“What (Kedar) would tend to do would be to eat a lot of food at one time," his mom said. "It would go into the lungs and that would be catastrophic."Source: The Autism Site

Children in families with a history of brain conditions are at increased odds of being autistic, a large study in Sweden suggests1. The more closely related the family members with these conditions, the greater the child’s chances of having autism. Other studies have reported similar trends: A child…

Children with autism tend to carry variants in stretches of DNA that flank autism genes. These regions, once dismissed as ‘junk DNA,’ are now known to sometimes control the expression of genes that play key roles in brain development. The study is small, with just 53 families that each include one p…

People with autism are less surprised by unexpected occurrences than are typical adults, according to a new study1. That may be because they see the world as highly changeable, and expect the unexpected. The researchers measured reaction times to unexpected cues that came up during a simple picture-…

An evaluation of 11 tests of social skills has identified 8 that give credible results in autistic adults1. People with autism often have trouble with social skills, including with perceiving and interpreting social information. However, training programs for these skills are difficult to evaluate b…

Whether we are at home or work, we don’t really pay attention to the many sounds that surround us, and that we depend on to take action. Think of the microwave beeping – if it beeps, our food is cooked. If an infant is crying, we need to feed her or stop doing what we are doing and atten…

The same techniques that generate images of smoke, clouds and fantastic beasts in movies can render neurons and brain structures in fine-grained detail. Two projects presented yesterday at the 2017 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C., gave attendees a sampling of what these p…

By Christa Holmans, Neurodivergent Rebel In early February the stores begin to fill with pink, red, and white hearts. Memories of elementary school come flooding in. Suddenly I’m sitting in a small-town classroom, peering down into an empty Valentine box. I’ve never attracted a mate who was into giv…

By matching gene expression patterns in postmortem brains to imaging data from living individuals, researchers have uncovered 38 genes that may collaborate to control neural activity in the brain.1 Nine of the genes are known autism candidates. The findings, published 18 November in Neuron, could he…