AIMS-2-TRIALS researchers are working alongside autistic people to develop technology that objectively measures aspects of their experience. Wearable devices, such as smart watches, can include sensors to record information like heart rate and skin conductivity and...

Innovation Radar is a European Commission initiative to identify innovations and innovators in EU-funded research. AIMS-2-TRIALS recently submitted several important developments to the scheme, receiving positive feedback and inclusion within the Innovation Radar...

New AIMS-2-TRIALS research finds that autistic people with more social communication difficulties have different brain connectivity compared to autistic people with an equal mix of social traits and repetitive behaviours. Background A diagnosis of autism includes the...

Listen to AIMS-2-TRIALS researcher Professor Emily Jones talk about her work on theta waves and information processing on the PsychologiCall podcast. During this podcast she talks about her research looking at how changes in early brain activity may predict later...

Autistic children can have differing preferences for social stimuli such as faces compared to non-social stimuli, and research suggests that differences in brain activity could underlie this and be predictive of later autism. A team of researchers including Dr Anna...

Autistic people have long made the case that they should be involved in research about them and many researchers now consider this to be part of the standard research process. This involvement is sometimes referred to as ‘participatory research’ and can be done in a...

Many autistic people will tell you they have struggled to access a service, or perhaps more than one, whether that be health or social care, employment support, financial assistance, an educational programme, or one of many others. But policymakers can’t commission...

Around three times as many males are diagnosed with autism than females, which suggests that sex-related biological factors play a key role in its development. However, little is known about the ways that autistic males and females differ in terms of brain structure...

A world-leading AIMS-2-TRIALS team at the Institut Pasteur (Paris) has developed a secure database to address the needs of the AIMS-2-TRIALS project, ensuring that large, multidisciplinary datasets from participants across Europe are secure, GDPR compliant and easily...

AIMS-2-TRIALS researchers from King’s College London have revealed that reduced flexible behaviour in autistic people is underpinned by different dominant learning mechanisms across development, and less optimal learning. Background Flexible behaviour is critical for...

Genetic instructions in our DNA are able to build a human from scratch and no two human beings are perfectly identical; we differ in our height, eye color, how we look, think, feel and act. Scientists know that differences in our DNA code explain some of these...

Understanding individual differences in early brain development can help predict long-term outcomes in children who are later found to be autistic. Because children’s brains develop rapidly, measurements need to focus on factors that are relatively stable, rather than...

Professor Emily Jones of Birkbeck University, London was featured on an episode of the Association for Child & Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH) Podcast discussing the brain, early development, and autism.

Placebos, such as sugar pills or saline injections, are designed to have no direct effects, yet treatment with placebo can substantially improve symptoms across many conditions. This is called a placebo response or placebo effect. Researchers often compare results for...