Atypical development of face and greeble recognition in autism
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: Impaired face processing is a widely documented deficit in autism. Although the origin of this deficit is unclear, several groups have suggested that a lack of perceptual expertise is contributory. We investigated whether individuals with autism develop expertise in visuoperceptual processing of faces and whether any deficiency in such processing is specific to faces, or extends to other objects, too. METHOD: Participants performed perceptual discrimination tasks, including a face inversion task and a classification-level task, which requires especially fine-grained discriminations, on three classes of stimuli: socially-laden faces, perceptually homogenous novel objects, greebles, and perceptually heterogeneous common objects. RESULTS: We found that children with autism develop typical levels of expertise for recognition of common objects. However, they evince poorer recognition for perceptually homogenous objects, including faces and, most especially, greebles. CONCLUSIONS: Documenting the atypical recognition abilities for greebles in children with autism has provided an important insight into the potential origin of the relatively poor face recognition skills. Our findings suggest that, throughout development, individuals with autism have a generalized deficit in visuoperceptual processing that may interfere with their ability to undertake configural processing, and that this, in turn, adversely impacts their recognition of within-class perceptually homogenous objects.
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Atypical face processing in ASD could arise from sociocognitive factors or reflect visual processing deficits more broadly.
“Atypical face processing in ASD could arise from sociocognitive factors, or reflect visual processing deficits more broadly, such as distinguishing between both social and non-social stimuli that are visually complex or highly similar, including upright faces, inverted faces, and cars (Ewing et al., 2013); and poor ability to discriminate between novel, and perceptually similar objects (Greebles)”
From The impact of atypical sensory processing on social impairments in autism spectrum disorder (2018) · cites this paper as Scherf et al., 2008
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The impact of atypical sensory processing on social impairments in autism spectrum disorder
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- Authors
- Suzanne Scherf, K., Behrmann, M., Minshew, N., & Luna, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Pittsburgh (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2008-07-28
- Volume
- 49
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 838-847
- ISSN
- 0021-9630 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-7610
- PMC
- PMC3071970
- OpenAlex
- W2149672898
- Cited by
- 69
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 2.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P01/U19 HD35469-07, T32HD049354, U19HD035469, P50HD055748)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Autism Spectrum Disorder Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Keywords
- autism spectrum disorder, face recognition (cognition), Greebles, perceptual expertise, configural processing, face inversion, object recognition
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Autistic Disorder, Child, Face, Female, Humans, Male, Perceptual Disorders, Visual Perception, Recognition, Psychology
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