Are people with autism prosopagnosic?

Abstract

Difficulties in various face processing tasks have been well documented in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Several meta‐analyses and numerous case–control studies have indicated that this population experiences a moderate degree of impairment, with a small percentage of studies failing to detect any impairment. One possible account of this mixed pattern of findings is heterogeneity in face processing abilities stemming from the presence of a subpopulation of prosopagnosic individuals with ASD alongside those with normal face processing skills. Samples randomly drawn from such a population, especially relatively smaller ones, would vary in the proportion of participants with prosopagnosia, resulting in a wide range of group‐level deficits from mild (or none) to severe across studies. We test this prosopagnosic subpopulation hypothesis by examining three groups of participants: adults with ASD, adults with developmental prosopagnosia (DP), and a comparison group. Our results show that the prosopagnosic subpopulation hypothesis does not account for the face impairments in the broader autism spectrum. ASD observers show a continuous and graded, rather than categorical, heterogeneity that span a range of face processing skills including many with mild to moderate deficits, inconsistent with a prosopagnosic subtype account. We suggest that pathogenic origins of face deficits for at least some with ASD differ from those of DP.

Autistic adults have insight into their relative face recognition ability

“…Recently, some authors have rejected this account citing evidence that autistic samples still exhibit belowaverage face recognition when those who meet the diagnostic criteria for prosopagnosia are removed 11 . However, this critique overlooks two issues.…”

“…Indeed, around 2% of the general population describe lifelong face recognition problems severe enough to disrupt their daily lives 6,7 . The incidence of lifelong face recognition di culties is particularly high amongst autistic individuals, many of whom experience problems when asked to identify or match faces [8][9][10][11] .…”

“…These results suggests that the PI20 may not be suitable for screening autistic participants for face recognition di culties. This would be a non-trivial limitation, not least because face recognition di culties appear to be far more prevalent in the autistic population than in the non-autistic population [8][9][10][11] .…”

“…It has been noted previously that the face recognition abilities of autistic participants vary widely [8][9][10][11]23 .…”