What's in a face? The case of autism

Hobson, R. Peter; Ouston, Janet; Lee, A.

doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1988.tb02745.x

Cited by 390 publications

(310 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(38 reference statements)

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“…Moreover, it appears that, as for object processing, autistic subjects present peculiar ways of processing faces by relying more on local facial features than on configural aspects of faces (i.e., the relationship between the different parts). Performance of adolescents and adults with autism (Hobson, Ouston, & Lee, 1988) and of autistic children (Langdell, 1978;Tantam, Monaghan, Nicholson, & Stirling, 1989) was not altered, compared with controls, when faces were presented inverted. In these studies, autistic subjects made an equal number of correct answers when faces were presented upright and inverted, whereas control children made significantly more errors when faces were presented inverted compared with upright.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Spatial Frequency and Face Processing in Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Deruelle

Rondan

Gepner

et al. 2004

J Autism Dev Disord

270

200

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Spatial Frequency and Face Processing in Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Deruelle

Rondan

Gepner

et al. 2004

J Autism Dev Disord

270

200

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…However, between group differences emerged depending on mask placement, suggesting that children with ASD relied more on facial information in the mouth area in contrast to controls who relied more on the eye region. Others have found evidence for unusual reliance on facial features as apposed to configural face information in ASD [106,107]. Further studies are needed to determine the correlation between face viewing strategies and subsequent identity recognition performance among children with ASD and typically developing controls.…”

Section: Anomalous Identity Recognition In Asdmentioning

confidence: 98%

Autism and the development of face processing

Golarai

Grill-Spector

Reiss

2006

Clinical Neuroscience Research

156

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Autism is a pervasive developmental condition, characterized by impairments in non-verbal communication, social relationships and stereotypical patterns of behavior. A large body of evidence suggests that several aspects of face processing are impaired in autism, including anomalies in gaze processing, memory for facial identity and recognition of facial expressions of emotion. In search of neural markers of anomalous face processing in autism, much interest has focused on a network of brain regions that are implicated in social cognition and face processing. In this review, we will focus on three such regions, namely the STS for its role in processing gaze and facial movements, the FFA in face detection and identification and the amygdala in processing facial expressions of emotion. Much evidence suggests that a better understanding of the normal development of these specialized regions is essential for discovering the neural bases of face processing anomalies in autism. Thus, we will also examine the available literature on the normal development of face processing. Key unknowns in this research area are the neuro-developmental processes, the role of experience and the interactions among components of the face processing system in shaping each of the specialized regions for processing faces during normal development and in autism. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease.

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“…At the same time, individuals with autism appear to be limited in their ability to derive organized wholes from perceptual parts, which has been linked to their limited use of gestalt grouping heuristics [Brosnan, Scott, Fox, & Pye, 2004], the failure to process inter-element relationships [Behrmann et al, 2006], and/or the failure to consider the entire visual context [Happé, 1996]. Several studies have argued that this focus on local features is specifically detrimental to face recognition processes [Boucher & Lewis, 1992;Davies, Bishop, Manstead, & Tantam, 1994;Hobson, Ouston, & Lee, 1988;Joseph & Tanaka, 2003;Klin et al, 2002;Lahaie et al, 2006]. This atypical sensitivity to local elements has been addressed in two theoretical frameworks.…”

Section: Perceptual Organization In Individuals With Autismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Missing the big picture: impaired development of global shape processing in autism

et al. 2008

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Individuals with autism exhibit hypersensitivity to local elements of the input, which may interfere with the ability to group visual elements perceptually. We investigated the development of perceptual grouping abilities in highfunctioning individuals with autism (HFA) across a wide age range (8-30 years) using a classic compound letter global/ local (GL) task and a more fine-grained microgenetic prime paradigm (MPP), including both few-and many-element hierarchical displays. In the GL task, contrary to the typically developing (TD) controls, HFA participants did not develop an increasing sensitivity to the global information with age. In the MPP, like the TD controls, individuals with autism at all three age groups evinced a bias to individuate the few-element displays. However, contrary to the TD controls, the HFA group failed to show age-related improvements in the ability to encode the global shape of the many-element displays. In fact, across the age range, the HFA group was consistently faster than the TD controls at perceiving the local elements in these displays. These results indicate that in autism the full process of garnering shape information from perceptual grouping, which is essential for the ability to do fast and efficient object recognition and identification, never matures, and this is especially evident in adolescence when this ability begins to improve in TD individuals. The atypical development of these perceptual organizational abilities may disrupt processing of visually presented objects, which may, in turn, fundamentally impede the development of major aspects of the social and emotional behaviors in individuals with autism.

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What's in a face? The case of autism

Cited by 390 publications

References 25 publications

Spatial Frequency and Face Processing in Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Spatial Frequency and Face Processing in Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Autism and the development of face processing

Missing the big picture: impaired development of global shape processing in autism

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