For a study, the researchers focused on the critical moment shown to be essential in the process of face identification. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder defined and diagnosed by core deficits in social communication and the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors. Researchers through the outlines applied an established eye-tracking and face identification paradigm to comprehensively characterize the initial eye movement to a face and test its functional consequence on face identification performance in adolescents with and without ASD (n=21 per group), and in neurotypical adults. Researchers measured how the face identification performance varied as a function of that location. Adolescent participants also completed a more traditional measure of face identification which allowed the researchers to more fully characterize face identification abilities in ASD. The outlines indicated that the location of the initial look to faces and face identification performance for briefly presented faces were intact in ASD, ruling out the possibility that deficits in face perception, at least in adolescents with ASD, begin with the initial eye movement to the face. However, individuals with ASD showed impairments on the more traditional measure of face identification. Together, the observed dissociation between initial, rapid face perception processes and other measures of face perception offered new insights and hypotheses associated with the timing and perceptual complexity of face processing and how these specific aspects of face identification may be disrupted in ASD.
Link:jneurodevdisorders.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s11689-019-9303-z
