Abstract
Face recognition difficulties are frequently documented in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It has been hypothesized that these difficulties result from a reduced interest in faces early in life, leading to decreased cortical specialization and atypical development of the neural circuitry for face processing. However, a recent study by our lab demonstrated that infants at increased familial risk for ASD, irrespective of their diagnostic status at 3 years, exhibit a clear orienting response to faces. The present study was conducted as a follow-up on the same cohort to investigate how measures of early engagement with faces relate to face-processing abilities later in life. We also investigated whether face recognition difficulties are specifically related to an ASD diagnosis, or whether they are present at a higher rate in all those at familial risk. At 3 years we found a reduced ability to recognize unfamiliar faces in the high-risk group that was not specific to those children who received an ASD diagnosis, consistent with face recognition difficulties being an endophenotype of the disorder. Furthermore, we found that longer looking at faces at 7 months was associated with poorer performance on the face recognition task at 3 years in the high-risk group. These findings suggest that longer looking at faces in infants at risk for ASD might reflect early face-processing difficulties and predicts difficulties with recognizing faces later in life.
Highlights
The ability to recognize and process information from the faces of the people around us is crucial for functioning in our highly social world
These conflicting findings with regard to performance on face recognition tasks are likely to result from differences in experimental tasks, participant ages, and control group criteria especially as difficulties appear to be more evident in younger children (Sasson, 2006)
One-sample t-tests on the means corrected for Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) early learning composite (ELC) score demonstrated that the low-risk controls performed above chance level for both difficulty levels, p < .001, while the high-risk siblings performed above chance on the easy items, p < .001, but at chance level on the difficult items, p =
Summary
The ability to recognize and process information from the faces of the people around us is crucial for functioning in our highly social world. Other studies with toddlers (Chawarska & Volkmar, 2007), and adults (Barton, Cherkasova, Hefter, Cox, O’Connor & Manoach, 2004) failed to find consistent face recognition problems in individuals with ASD, or suggest that face recognition difficulties are the result of general perceptual atypicalities that are not specific to faces (Davies, Bishop, Manstead & Tantam, 1994) These conflicting findings with regard to performance on face recognition tasks are likely to result from differences in experimental tasks, participant ages, and control group criteria (use of chronological age, mental age, verbal or non-verbal IQ) especially as difficulties appear to be more evident in younger children (Sasson, 2006). Even a very minimal increase in memory demand, for example by presenting stimuli sequentially rather than simultaneously, seems to result in problems with face discrimination
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