Generally speaking, yes it is. There is good research showing that earlier in life children with autism have more brain cells and bigger brains than children who don’t have autism. This probably affects how well brain cells can communicate with one another. There’s also a large number of differences in brain “function” — for example, which parts of the brain activate during the performance of certain behaviours or mental tasks — as well as differences in levels of chemical messengers throughout the brain.
I think Peter’s already answered this pretty well – he’s the expert on this! 🙂
I know some interesting things about autistic kids and eye movements though! Experiments have shown that when you put an eye-tracker on normal people and show them a face and ask “what emotion is this face showing?” the normal people’s eye movements are generally restricted to looking at the eyes and the mouth. This shows that people generally use these as indicators if someone is happy or sad etc.
Autistic people however, when they do the same experiment, don’t look at the eyes and mouth, and instead look all around the face – at the ears, hair, chin…places which don’t really give you any information about the emotion the face is showing.
lachlanmac123
Generally speaking, yes it is. There is good research showing that earlier in life children with autism have more brain cells and bigger brains than children who don’t have autism. This probably affects how well brain cells can communicate with one another. There’s also a large number of differences in brain “function” — for example, which parts of the brain activate during the performance of certain behaviours or mental tasks — as well as differences in levels of chemical messengers throughout the brain.
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I think Peter’s already answered this pretty well – he’s the expert on this! 🙂
I know some interesting things about autistic kids and eye movements though! Experiments have shown that when you put an eye-tracker on normal people and show them a face and ask “what emotion is this face showing?” the normal people’s eye movements are generally restricted to looking at the eyes and the mouth. This shows that people generally use these as indicators if someone is happy or sad etc.
Autistic people however, when they do the same experiment, don’t look at the eyes and mouth, and instead look all around the face – at the ears, hair, chin…places which don’t really give you any information about the emotion the face is showing.
Pretty fascinating!
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