The Autism Collaborative is a group of autism researchers committed to cooperation and open scientific exchange. Its members aim to advance understanding of autism’s causes and treatments by sharing their software, research methods, and anonymised experimental data, rather than competing for discoveries. The group’s first cooperative project is Astropolis, a video game designed to study perceptual, attentional, and social-cognitive aspects of autistic behaviour together.

The game embeds research tasks in an engaging virtual environment, allowing researchers to collect behavioural data and synchronise it with physiological recordings as participants play. This approach addresses the challenge of making controlled experiments interesting and explores how motivation and context can influence cognitive performance. The project also examines autistic and non-autistic siblings, helping researchers distinguish differences associated with familial tendencies from those associated with autism itself.

Supported by an Autism Speaks pilot research grant and a US National Science Foundation award, the work is basic science with an eye toward future therapeutic interventions