Autistic children do not exhibit an own-race advantage as compared to typically developing children

Abstract

The characteristics of aberrant face processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been extensively studied, but the aspect regarding sensitivity to race is relatively unexplored. The present study hypothesized that the magnitude of the other-race effect shall be reduced in individuals with ASD owing to their inattention to faces since infancy. Using a sequential face discrimination task, we tested the other-race effect of 18 ASD (mean age=7.5 years) and 13 age-matched typically developing (TD) children (mean age=7.6 years). The stimuli were cropped Asian and African faces, each with four levels of difficulty: easy (change identity), medium (replaced eyes), hard-eye (widen eye spacing), and hard-mouth (moved up mouth). The TD children showed a significant own-race advantage such that the best performance was found in the Asian easy condition. The ASD children did not exhibit such advantage at all. Moreover, ASD children showed the highest error rates in the hard-eye condition instead of the hard-mouth condition, indicating insensitivity to eyes region. In sum, our findings support the hypothesis that the other-race effect is reduced in ASD children, reflecting an incomplete development of an expert face system.