OBJECTIVE To determine whether the proportion of time spent in an inclusive educational setting, a process indicator of the quality of schooling for children with autism, improves key outcomes. METHODS Patients were 484 children and youth educated in special education with a primary diagnosis of autism in the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2. These individuals were ages 20 to 23 in 20...

In the field of autism research, recent work has been devoted to studying both behavioral and neural markers that may aide in early identification of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These studies have often tested infants who have a significant family history of autism spectrum disorder, given the increased prevalence observed among such infants. In the present study we tested infants at high- ...

We examined the effects of viewing high-arousal pictures on regional brain activations elicited by a cognitive control task in participants with high-functioning autism and neurotypical controls. Specifically, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we assessed the effects of brief presentations of highly arousing pictures (i.e., both very pleasant and very unpleasant) on the...

First, they are present in individuals in the nonautistic group of the studies they cite. The autistic-related traits of these studies derive from group average comparisons that hide—as can be seen in inspection on the nonautistic control group data—individuals who have the same trait as that identified at the group level with autism. None of the reviewed physical or functional traits indeed id...

Autism is often described as a disorder of neural synchronization. However, it is unknown how early in development synchronization abnormalities emerge and whether they are related to the development of early autistic behavioral symptoms. Here, we show that disrupted synchronization is evident in the spontaneous cortical activity of naturally sleeping toddlers with autism, but not in toddlers w...

Children with autism exhibit impairment in the processing of socioemotional information. The amygdala, a core structure centrally involved in socioemotional functioning, has been implicated in the neuropathology of autism. We collected structural and functional magnetic resonance images (MRI) in children 8 to 12 years of age with high-functioning autism (n=12) and typical development (n=15). Th...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study compared the neural activation patterns of 18 high-functioning individuals with autism and 18 IQ-matched neurotypical control participants as they learned to perform a social judgment task. Participants learned to identify liars among pairs of computer-animated avatars uttering the same sentence but with different facial and vocal expressions, na...