A video teaching tool released on DVD by the Autism Research Center of Cambridge hopes to bring better understanding of emotion and facial expressions to children on the autism spectrum. A challenge for many children, the DVD breaks down in simple and fun manner, ways for the children to build on knowing emotions like happiness, anger, sadness etc.

Coming to an end yesterday November 19th was the 38th annual conference of Georgetown University and Georgetown Univerisity Medical Center's departments of neuroscience, psychology, physiology, and biophysics. The conference, attended by some of the brightest minds in the field of neurosciences brought new ideas and research findings in many areas, including autism. Among topics addressed were the inability for some with autism to recognize faces as easily or quickly as someone not affected by autism.

Academy of Finland researchers discovered that the visual system of the brain will more efficiently processes another person's face when they are looking directly at it rather than from an averted gaze. An averted gaze can negatively impact the neural mechanisms that regulate approach and avoidance behavior.