Abstract
Ensemble perception, the ability to assess automatically the summary of large amounts of information presented in visual scenes, is available early in typical development. This ability might be compromised in autistic children, who are thought to present limitations in maintaining summary statistics representations for the recent history of sensory input. Here we examined ensemble perception of facial emotional expressions in 35 autistic children, 30 age- and ability-matched typical children and 25 typical adults. Participants received three tasks: a) an ‘ensemble’ emotion discrimination task; b) a baseline (single-face) emotion discrimination task; and c) a facial expression identification task. Children performed worse than adults on all three tasks. Unexpectedly, autistic and typical children were, on average, indistinguishable in their precision and accuracy on all three tasks. Computational modelling suggested that, on average, autistic and typical children used ensemble-encoding strategies to a similar extent; but ensemble perception was related to non-verbal reasoning abilities in autistic but not in typical children. Eye-movement data also showed no group differences in the way children attended to the stimuli. Our combined findings suggest that the abilities of autistic and typical children for ensemble perception of emotions are comparable on average.
Highlights
Human perception will often seek the summary, the texture or the ‘gist’ of large amounts of information presented in visual scenes
Properties of group percepts – whether a book collection is tidied up or not, whether a view belongs to an old or a contemporary city – seem to be accessible rapidly and effortlessly, and with little awareness of details differentiating individual elements. This ability to assess automatically the summary or ‘gist’ of large amounts of information presented in visual scenes, often referred to as ensemble perception or ensemble encoding, is crucial for navigating an inherently complex world (Chong and Treisman, 2003, 2005; Haberman and Whitney, 2009; Sweeny et al, 2013)
A large body of empirical research has demonstrated the abilities of human perception to rapidly and automatically extract the summary or the gist of large amounts of information presented in visual scenes, referred to as ensemble perception
Summary
Human perception will often seek the summary, the texture or the ‘gist’ of large amounts of information presented in visual scenes. We evaluated two predictions, based on Pellicano and Burr (2012), for the patterns of performance of autistic and typical children and adolescents (aged between 6 and 18 years; hereafter ‘children’) by developing a developmentally-appropriate version of Haberman and Whitney (2007)'s paradigm for ensemble perception of emotions. We predicted that autistic children should perform better than typical children in Task 3, identifying emotional morphs that had been previously presented to them This advantage could be due to a greater reliance upon detailed representations of individual items, which are more important in this particular task, rather than on summary statistics (cf Happé and Frith, 2006; Pellicano and Burr, 2012). We hypothesised that children were likely to show reduced abilities for ensemble perception compared to adults, similar to Sweeny et al.'s (2014) findings for the development of ensemble perception of size
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