Eye contact is oftent described as stressful or aversive by autistic individuals. In this talk,  I will discuss the neural mechanisms underlying gaze and face perception in autism, highlighting evidence that points to an imbalance between excitation and inhibition in key brain networks. I will further show how restoring this balance may lead to more typical gaze patterns and improved social understanding. Together, these findings shed light on the neurobiological basis of social perception and suggest promising directions for intervention. 

     The brain must often make decisions in tasks -- like mazes, social situations, or investment -- where candidate actions are separated from their consequences by many steps of space and time. A central computational problem in decision making is spanning these gaps to work out the long-term consequences of candidate actions. I review recent experimental and theoretical work aimed at understanding the mechanisms by which the brain solves this problem. Our understanding of this parallels the development of approaches to this problem in artificial intelligence: following early enthusiasm about planning by exhaustive search, both computer scientists and neuroscientists have come to understand the importance of judiciously pretraining and adapting one's computations to future needs. This offers a nerw perspective on a range of issues such as habits and automaticity in the healthy brain, but also suggests candidate mechanisms that may underlie dysfunctions such as compulsion, rumination, and avoidance.