Face perception develops similarly across viewpoint in children and adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Atypical face perception has been associated with the socio-communicative difficulties that characterize autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Growing evidence, however, suggests that a widespread impairment in face perception is not as common as once thought. One important issue arising with the interpretation of this literature is the relationship between face processing and a more general perceptual tendency to focus on local rather than global information. Previous work has demonstrated that when discriminating faces presented from the same view, older adolescents and adults with ASD perform similarly to typically developing individuals. When faces are presented from different views, however, they perform more poorly-specifically, when access to local cues is minimized. In this study, we assessed the cross-sectional development of face identity discrimination across viewpoint using same- and different-view conditions in children and adolescents with and without ASD. Contrary to the findings in adults, our results revealed that all participants experienced greater difficulty identifying faces from different views than from same views, and demonstrated similar age-expected improvements in performance across tasks. These results suggest that differences in face discrimination across views may only emerge beyond the age of 15 years in ASD.

Brain activity during facial processing in autism spectrum disorder: an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta‐analysis of neuroimaging studies

“…Examination of the primary studies corroborated these findings, showing that only two studies of the children/adolescent group versus nine in the adult group reported differences in amygdala. These findings are consistent with behavioral studies suggesting that impairments in face perception in ASD might not be present in childhood, but develop from the age of fifteen (Guy, Habak, Wilson, Mottron, & Bertone, 2017). Moreover, neuroimaging studies demonstrated that the neural network underpinning face perception undergoes a slow process of maturation during childhood and adolescence, including a blunted response of the amygdala in normally developing children (Behrmann, Scherf, & Avidan, 2016; Pfeifer et al., 2011).…”

Quantifying the effect of viewpoint changes on sensitivity to face identity

“…Viewpoint changes, however, also impair the ability to discriminate between novel, unfamiliar face identities (Favelle, Hill & Claes, 2017;Guy, Habak, Wilson et al, 2017;Habak, Wilkinson & Wilson, 2008;Lee et al, 2006;Meinhardt-Injac, Meinhardt & Schwaninger, 2009;Morin, Guy, Habak et al, 2015;Newell et al, 1999;Troje & Bülthoff, 1996;Wilson, Loffler & Wilkinson, 2002). The paradigms employed by these studies made minimal memory demands.…”

“…Importantly, however, the present study focused upon a small range of angular rotations (±20°), centered upon the frontal view. This ensured that the individual features of faces presented from the side were partially, rather than completely, obscured (Guy et al, 2017;Morin et al, 2015). In order to extrapolate our data to faces presented from larger viewing angles, one would need to assume that the relationship between viewing angle and face discrimination sensitivity remains linear beyond the range that we tested.…”