Norm-based coding of facial identity in adults with autism spectrum disorder

Walsh, Jennifer A.; Maurer, Daphne; Vida, Mark D.; Rhodes, Gillian; Jeffery, Linda; Rutherford, M. D.

doi:10.1016/j.visres.2014.11.018

Cited by 18 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…An interesting future direction will be to see whether the aftereffect task used here reveals reduced adaptation in adults with autism. We note that an analogous identity aftereffect task that showed reduced adaptation in children and adults (Rhodes, Ewing, et al ., ) failed to show a clear deficit in adults (Walsh et al ., ), consistent with the developmental delay hypothesis.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Facial expression coding in children and adolescents with autism: Reduced adaptability but intact norm‐based coding

Rhodes

Burton

Jeffery

et al. 2017

British J of Psychology

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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can have difficulty recognizing emotional expressions. Here, we asked whether the underlying perceptual coding of expression is disrupted. Typical individuals code expression relative to a perceptual (average) norm that is continuously updated by experience. This adaptability of face-coding mechanisms has been linked to performance on various face tasks. We used an adaptation aftereffect paradigm to characterize expression coding in children and adolescents with autism. We asked whether face expression coding is less adaptable in autism and whether there is any fundamental disruption of norm-based coding. If expression coding is norm-based, then the face aftereffects should increase with adaptor expression strength (distance from the average expression). We observed this pattern in both autistic and typically developing participants, suggesting that norm-based coding is fundamentally intact in autism. Critically, however, expression aftereffects were reduced in the autism group, indicating that expression-coding mechanisms are less readily tuned by experience. Reduced adaptability has also been reported for coding of face identity and gaze direction. Thus, there appears to be a pervasive lack of adaptability in face-coding mechanisms in autism, which could contribute to face processing and broader social difficulties in the disorder.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Facial expression coding in children and adolescents with autism: Reduced adaptability but intact norm‐based coding

Rhodes

Burton

Jeffery

et al. 2017

British J of Psychology

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“…We measured the change in perceived identity of the average face rather than full psychometric functions (so that the testing session did not become too long). This shorter procedure has been used successfully to measure identity aftereffects in special populations (Rhodes et al, 2014a;Walsh, Maurer, Vida, Rhodes, Jeffery et al, 2015). We also included test faces with 80% identity strength (easy trials) to help maintain motivation and to check that participants remembered the target identities.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The face stimuli were taken from previous studies of the identity aftereffect and have been described in detail previously (Walsh et al, 2015). Briefly, there were two male target identities ('Ted' and 'Rob') (different from the identities used in Experiment 1).…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduced adaptability, but no fundamental disruption, of norm‐based face coding following early visual deprivation from congenital cataracts

Rhodes

Nishimura

Heering

et al. 2016

Developmental Science

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Faces are adaptively coded relative to visual norms that are updated by experience, and this adaptive coding is linked to face recognition ability. Here we investigated whether adaptive coding of faces is disrupted in individuals (adolescents and adults) who experience face recognition difficulties following visual deprivation from congenital cataracts in infancy. We measured adaptive coding using face identity aftereffects, where smaller aftereffects indicate less adaptive updating of face-coding mechanisms by experience. We also examined whether the aftereffects increase with adaptor identity strength, consistent with norm-based coding of identity, as in typical populations, or whether they show a different pattern indicating some more fundamental disruption of face-coding mechanisms. Cataract-reversal patients showed significantly smaller face identity aftereffects than did controls (Experiments 1 and 2). However, their aftereffects increased significantly with adaptor strength, consistent with norm-based coding (Experiment 2). Thus we found reduced adaptability but no fundamental disruption of norm-based face-coding mechanisms in cataract-reversal patients. Our results suggest that early visual experience is important for the normal development of adaptive face-coding mechanisms.

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“…Finding that adaptation biases face recognition with respect to the norm rather than simply biasing recognition away from the adaptor has been widely interpreted as evidence for norm-based coding ( Rhodes et al, 2005 ; Rhodes and Jeffery, 2006 ; Robbins et al, 2007 ; Susilo et al, 2010 ; Rhodes and Leopold, 2011 ; Rhodes and Calder, 2014 ; Short et al, 2014 ; Walsh et al, 2015 , but see Zhao et al, 2011 ; Storrs and Arnold, 2012 ). At its most simplest, finding that face adaptation is sensitive to the norm intuitively suggests that face representations are constructed with respect to a norm.…”

Section: Intuitions About Face Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Importance of Formalizing Computational Models of Face Adaptation Aftereffects

Ross

Palmeri

2016

Front. Psychol.

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Face adaptation is widely used as a means to probe the neural representations that support face recognition. While the theories that relate face adaptation to behavioral aftereffects may seem conceptually simple, our work has shown that testing computational instantiations of these theories can lead to unexpected results. Instantiating a model of face adaptation not only requires specifying how faces are represented and how adaptation shapes those representations but also specifying how decisions are made, translating hidden representational states into observed responses. Considering the high-dimensionality of face representations, the parallel activation of multiple representations, and the non-linearity of activation functions and decision mechanisms, intuitions alone are unlikely to succeed. If the goal is to understand mechanism, not simply to examine the boundaries of a behavioral phenomenon or correlate behavior with brain activity, then formal computational modeling must be a component of theory testing. To illustrate, we highlight our recent computational modeling of face adaptation aftereffects and discuss how models can be used to understand the mechanisms by which faces are recognized.

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Norm-based coding of facial identity in adults with autism spectrum disorder

Cited by 18 publications

References 41 publications

Facial expression coding in children and adolescents with autism: Reduced adaptability but intact norm‐based coding

Facial expression coding in children and adolescents with autism: Reduced adaptability but intact norm‐based coding

Reduced adaptability, but no fundamental disruption, of norm‐based face coding following early visual deprivation from congenital cataracts

The Importance of Formalizing Computational Models of Face Adaptation Aftereffects

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