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

Ewing, Louise; Pellicano, Liz; King, H T; Lennuyeux-Comnene, Laura; Farran, Emily K.; Karmiloff‐Smith, Annette; Smith, Marie L.

doi:10.1080/87565641.2018.1449846

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…As a result, studies have begun recruiting a more equal number of male and female participants with ASD. There are several studies in the face identity processing literature that reflect this approach (e.g., Arkush, Smith-Collins, Fiorentini, & Skuse, 2013; Ewing et al, 2018; Philip et al, 2010; Reinvall, Voutilainen, Kujala, & Korkman, 2013; White, Hill, Winston, & Frith, 2006). If face identity processing is differentially impaired in males and females with ASD, then variations in the distribution of participant sex could explain inconsistencies in findings of group differences across studies as well.…”

Section: Reviewing the Existing Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

A quantitative meta-analysis of face recognition deficits in autism: 40 years of research.

Griffin

Bauer

Scherf

2021

Psychological Bulletin

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The ability to recognize an individual face is essential to human social interaction. Even subtle errors in this process can have huge implications for the way we relate to social partners. Because autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social interaction, researchers have theorized about the potential role of atypical face identity processing to the symptom profile of ASD for more than 40 years. We conducted an empirical meta-analysis of this large literature to determine whether and to what extent face identity processing is atypical in ASD compared to typically developing (TD) individuals. We also tested the hypotheses that the deficit is selective to face identity recognition, not perception, and that methodological variation across studies moderates the magnitude of the estimated deficit. We identified 112 studies (5,390 participants) that generated 172 effect sizes from both recognition (k ϭ 119) and discrimination (k ϭ 53) paradigms. We used state-of-the-art approaches for assessing the validity and robustness of the analyses. We found comparable and large deficits in ASD for both face identity recognition (Hedge's g ϭ Ϫ0.86) and discrimination (Hedge's g ϭ Ϫ0.82). This means that the score of an average ASD individual is nearly 1 SD below the average TD individual on tasks assessing both aspects of face identity processing. These deficits generalize across age groups, sex, IQ scores, and task paradigms. These findings suggest that deficits in face identity processing may represent a core deficit in ASD. Public Significance StatementWe present a data-driven analysis of the face recognition research in autism from the last 40 years. Our findings indicate that people with ASD struggle to process information about the identity of a face. This deficit is large, such that on average 80.5% of ASD individuals perform worse than typical individuals on tests of face identity processing. This impairment likely contributes to ASD-specific difficulties with social interaction, which require the ability to identify social partners as unique individuals.

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