When viewing naturalistic social situations, individuals with autism demonstrate abnormal patterns of social visual pursuit consistent with reduced salience of eyes and increased salience of mouths, bodies, and objects. Fixation times on mouths and objects but not on eyes are strong predictors of degree of social competence.

No abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders demonstrate a pattern of brain activity during face discrimination that is consistent with feature-based strategies that are more typical of nonface object perception.

Speech and prosody-voice profiles for 15 male speakers with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and 15 male speakers with Asperger syndrome (AS) were compared to one another and to profiles for 53 typically developing male speakers in the same 10- to 50-years age range. Compared to the typically developing speakers, significantly more participants in both the HFA and AS groups had residual articulation distortion errors, uncodable utterances due to discourse constraints, and utterances coded as inappropriate in the domains of phrasing, stress, and resonance. Speakers with AS were significantly more voluble than speakers with HFA, but otherwise there were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of speakers with pervasive developmental disorders. Discussion focuses on perceptual-motor and social sources of differences in the prosody-voice findings for individuals with Pervasive Developmental Disorders as compared with findings for typical speakers, including comment on the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective aspects of prosody.

Guanfacine appears to be a safe and effective treatment for children with tic disorders and ADHD.

Advances in the area will require increased consideration of processes underlying experimental results and a closer approximation of experimental methods to the naturalistic demands inherent in real-life social situations.

Fluvoxamine is more effective than placebo in the short-term treatment of the symptoms of autistic disorder in adults. Controlled studies of fluvoxamine and other potent and selective serotonin uptake inhibitors seem warranted in children and adolescents with autism.

Background:The pathophysiology of Tourette syndrome (TS) is thought to involve disturbances in corticostriato-thalamo-cortical circuitry. The morphological characteristics of the cortical and associated white matter portions of these circuits have not been previously examined in TS subjects.