Interesting Articles

Psychologists Use Non-Expert Student Observers In Autism Research

Non-expert is not often a term that one would associate with scientific research, but it could become a new trend in psychology research. Some recent studies have begun to rely on non-expert students to observe and provide data during experiments.

In a research project about early autism detection in infants, Dr. Daniel Messinger, an associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami (UM), and his research group are doing exactly that.

Communication Problems In The Brain 

For brain cells to communicate, the contacts to each other must function. The protein molecule neuroligin-1 plays an important role in this as it stimulates the necessary maturation processes at the contact sites (synapses) of the nerves. A synaptic maturation disorder is possibly involved in the development of autism. Dr. Thomas Dresbach and his team from the Institute for Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Heidelberg...