In 1994, Liane Kupferberg Carter ’76 and her husband found themselves watching as a team of unsmiling experts at a New York teaching hospital poked, prodded and measured their toddler son, Mickey.

Kanner, in his ground-breaking “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” (1943), described numerous examples of atypical sensory processing in his case studies of autistic children, as well as how ...