Wednesday, January 10, 2007

How thick is your cortex?

Morton Ann Gernsbacher is President of the Association for Psychological Science this year, and she's been giving autism a high profile in many of her monthly columns in the APS Observer. You can find two previous examples here and here.

Her latest illuminates a series of results in a trendy area of science, particularly in autism research. That's the measurement of cortical thickness. There have been several published papers, and surely more will come, asserting that autistics' cortices aren't the right thickness at all.

Dr Gernsbacher has put together a big heap of findings about thick and thin cortices, complete with how they've been interpreted. She seems to have done some work on effect sizes too. Now whose cortex is too thick, too thin, or just right?

Excerpting Dr Gernsbacher's latest column isn't fair to it. It's a classic. You have to go here and read the whole thing.