Abstract
Although not a core symptom of the disorder, individuals with autism often exhibit selective impairments in their face processing abilities. Importantly, the reciprocal connection between autistic traits and face perception has rarely been examined within the typically developing population. In this study, university participants from the social sciences, physical sciences, and humanities completed a battery of measures that assessed face, object and emotion recognition abilities, general perceptual-cognitive style, and sub-clinical autistic traits (the Autism Quotient (AQ)). We employed separate hierarchical multiple regression analyses to evaluate which factors could predict face recognition scores and AQ scores. Gender, object recognition performance, and AQ scores predicted face recognition behaviour. Specifically, males, individuals with more autistic traits, and those with lower object recognition scores performed more poorly on the face recognition test. Conversely, university major, gender and face recognition performance reliably predicted AQ scores. Science majors, males, and individuals with poor face recognition skills showed more autistic-like traits. These results suggest that the broader autism phenotype is associated with lower face recognition abilities, even among typically developing individuals.
Highlights
While repetitive behaviours, delayed language and impaired social function are the hallmarks of autism, many individuals on the autism spectrum experience problems recognizing faces [1,2] and interpreting facial expressions [3]
We investigated how sub-clinical autistic traits and face recognition in the typically developing (TD) population are related to the demographic variables of gender and university major as well as to cognitive abilities involved in visual perception, object and emotion recognition
Face recognition ability correlated with gender, object recognition, emotion recognition and Autism Quotient (AQ)
Summary
While repetitive behaviours, delayed language and impaired social function are the hallmarks of autism, many individuals on the autism spectrum experience problems recognizing faces [1,2] and interpreting facial expressions [3]. Despite the well-established link between autism and face recognition [2,4,5,6,7], it is less clear whether impaired face recognition is the consequence of, or a contributor to, the autistic condition. A reluctance to socially engage with others and an aversion to making eye contact will invariably lead to less perceptual experience with faces, which in turn, could result in impaired face processing ability [4]. Our main findings are that whereas autistic-like tendencies reliably predict poor face recognition performance, the converse is true, that impaired face processing predicts autistic-like tendencies
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