Abstract
Face processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is thought to be atypical, but it is unclear whether differences in visual conjunctive processing are specific to faces. To address this, we adapted a previously established eye-tracking paradigm which modulates the need for conjunctive processing by varying the degree of feature ambiguity in faces and objects. Typically-developed (TD) participants showed a canonical pattern of conjunctive processing: High-ambiguity objects were processed more conjunctively than low-ambiguity objects, and faces were processed in an equally conjunctive manner regardless of ambiguity level. In contrast, autistic individuals did not show differences in conjunctive processing based on stimulus category, providing evidence that atypical visual conjunctive processing in ASD is the result of a domain general lack of perceptual specialization.
Highlights
The human face conveys a wealth of socially relevant information, notably information needed to distinguish one face from another
This study tested whether atypical face processing in autism related to differences with visual conjunctive processing, and whether these were face-specific or domain-general effects
TD participants showed increases in visual conjunctive processing with ambiguous relative to unambiguous objects, whereas conjunctive processing of faces was not modulated by ambiguity
Summary
The human face conveys a wealth of socially relevant information, notably information needed to distinguish one face from another. This ability to bind individual pieces of sensory information to form unified percepts has been seen quite broadly both within and across sensory modalities (for review, see Baum et al, 2015) To test these two alternative hypotheses of face processing differences in autism, we adapted an eye-tracking paradigm designed to parse conjunctive and feature-based visual processing that has previously been used with other clinical populations (Barense et al, 2012; Newsome et al, 2012). The ASD group may show a lack of perceptual specialization whereby all stimuli are processed with a similar level of conjunctive processing, whether they are faces or non-face objects, and regardless of ambiguity level (Hadad et al, 2017) This would manifest as a change in the pattern of differences in conjunctive processing across stimulus types, but not necessarily an absolute reduction (Figure 2D)
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