Abnormal Use of Facial Information in High-Functioning Autism

Abstract

Altered visual exploration of faces likely contributes to social cognition deficits seen in autism. To investigate the relationship between face gaze and social cognition in autism, we measured both face gaze and how facial regions were actually used during emotion judgments from faces. Compared to IQ-matched healthy controls, nine high-functioning adults with autism failed to make use of information from the eye region of faces, instead relying primarily on information from the mouth. Face gaze accounted for the increased reliance on the mouth, and partially accounted for the deficit in using information from the eyes. These findings provide a novel quantitative assessment of how people with autism utilize information in faces when making social judgments.

Atypical information-use in children with autism spectrum disorder during judgments of child and adult face identity

“…Our confidence in the current findings is drawn from the extent to which our task closely resembles the classic Bubbles experimental paradigm, for example, with individual presentation of test stimuli. Moreover, our results are consistent with other behavioral and eye-tracking evidence that supports an autistic focus to fixate upon the mouth region (see Tanaka & Sung, 2013) and previous Bubbles research conducted with autistic adults reporting a strong reliance upon the mouth during fear vs happy judgments (see Spezio et al, 2006, 2007). …”

“…Our results indicate that autistic children differ from typical children not only in the specific features that they rely upon for these judgments of child and adult faces, but also more generally in the extent to which they demonstrate a flexible and adaptive profile of information use in this domain. These results were striking, even in our small sample of autistic participants—which was comparable to most previous studies in this domain, e.g., Spezio et al (2006) tested nine adults, Spezio et al (2007) tested eight adults, and Neumann et al (2006) tested ten adults. We acknowledge that the trial numbers were relatively small in the context of “classical” bubbles research (e.g., Gosselin & Schyns, 2001) but note that they were not far from the more modest numbers that have led to stable solutions in individual level analyses associated with EEG studies (e.g., Schyns, Petro, Smith, 2007, 2009).…”

“…There is a broad consensus that efficient (i.e., in some sense optimized) information use and flexible processing strategies support typical face expertise, but this link is yet to be empirically tested. It is true that evidence of atypical strategic information use in populations with face reading difficulties are consistent with this notion, for example, autism spectrum disorder (e.g., current study, also Neumann et al, 2006; Spezio et al, 2006, 2007) and prosopagnosia (e.g., Caldara et al, 2005; Xivry et al, 2008). Still these groups demonstrate other, potentially influential visuoperceptual and/or social atypicalities, making it an interesting open question whether this association truly holds and/or extends to the typical population.…”

“…See Table 1 for detailed descriptive information. The sample size is similar to Bubbles studies investigating information use in adults with ASD (e.g., Neumann et al, 2006; Spezio et al, 2006, 2007). These children were recruited from a primary school in London (with autism specialist and mainstream classrooms) and adults were personal contacts of the researchers.…”

“…Spezio, Adolphs, Hurley, and Piven (2006) used this technique with autistic adults to reveal face-processing strategies during expression categorization judgments (fear vs. happy). Relative to a group of typical adults of similar cognitive ability, autistic individuals demonstrated equivalent levels of performance accuracy but with a distinctly atypical profile of information use.…”