ITHACA -- For Matthew Belmonte, professor of human development at Cornell University, the issue of autism is personal. His brother is autistic.

Belmonte and his brother, who is six years older than he is, both wanted order in their lives and have similar habits, and Belmonte admired his mother for loving his brother without always knowing whether he understood.

"If I was meant to do anything, I was meant to figure something out about autism and the way it runs in families, something that would justify my mother's faith in my brother," Belmonte said.

Belmonte gave a lecture as part of the Autism and Central New York: Research and Practice conference last Saturday at Cornell. During his lecture, he said autistic people are not disengaged, but they perceive their observations differently, often focusing on low-level stimuli when other people would not.

"Understanding autism helps us to understand humanity in general, because there are many ways people with autism are human but more so," he said.

Belmonte initially majored in computer science and English while attending Cornell, but became interested in computer systems implemented in brains in 1991 and began attending graduate school the next year.

Belmonte received the $700,000 National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award to use video games in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalogy to study autistic cognition for the next five years. The science fiction-themed games, which Belmonte designed, include piloting a ship through an asteroid field and guessing where someone would look for an item after a space pirate moved it.

He said video games worked well in experiments because they could be repeated easily and kept subjects' interest.

"How many times can you wait for the light to come on and pull the lever before it gets boring?" Belmonte said.

Martha Herbert, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, said Belmonte was effective with technology such as MRI and could easily link to other researchers' work on autism, enabling him to get more information by seeing electrical activity in the brain and which parts are active.

"(Autism is) a very important issue because it shows us the limitations of our thinking and makes us think freshly and outside of the box in new ways," she said, noting that many existing theories were not as useful as people had thought.

Michael Goldstein, assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, said he liked discussing ideas with Belmonte, particularly regarding perception and cognition because he was honest and engaged.

"When you're brainstorming a new study, the worst thing is to have people nodding their heads at you," Goldstein said.

Goldstein said Belmonte's finding that autistic people perceive the world differently than non-autistic people will help find new solutions to deal with it.

"It's a long road from a basic research study to an applied intervention; it's a very long road, but if you don't start on the basic research, you'll never get to those interventions," he said.

Belmonte said he hoped to help eliminate or mitigate the deficits that came with being autistic so autistic people could share their unique perspective.

"The overarching goal is to give everyone on the autistic spectrum the ability to communicate and interact with the social world to share the unique perceptual and cognitive insights they have, and if we do that, our problem is solved," he said.