Social cognition in autism: Face tuning

Marina A Pavlova,Lucia Tagliavento,Andreas J Fallgatter,Michele Guerreschi,Filippo Gitti,Alexander N Sokolov,Elisa Fazzi

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-02790-1

Marina A Pavlova, Lucia Tagliavento + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-02790-1

Copy DOI

Abstract

Faces convey valuable information for social cognition, effective interpersonal interaction, and non-verbal communication. Face perception is believed to be atypical in autism, but the origin of this deficit is controversial. Dominant featural face encoding is suggested to be responsible for face tuning scarcity. Here we used a recently developed Face-n-Food paradigm for studying face tuning in individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). The key benefit of these images is that single components do not explicitly trigger face processing. In a spontaneous recognition task, adolescents with autism and typically developing matched controls were presented with a set of Face-n-Food images in different degree resembling a face (slightly bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style). The set of images was shown in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. Thresholds for recognition of the Face-n-Food images as a face in ASD individuals were substantially higher than in typically developing controls: they did not report seeing a face on the images, which controls easily recognized as a face, and gave overall fewer face responses. This outcome not only lends support to atypical face tuning, but provides novel insights into the origin of face encoding deficits in autism.

Highlights

Faces possess a special status across different domains of cognitive functioning due to their social relevance: they convey valuable information for effective interpersonal interaction and non-verbal communication
By using the recently created Face-n-Food task consisting of a set of food-plate images that comprised food ingredients such as fruits, vegetables, and sausages[34,35,36], we investigated face tuning in autism
The findings indicate that Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) individuals exhibit poor face tuning on the Face-n-Food task

Summary

Introduction

Faces possess a special status across different domains of cognitive functioning due to their social relevance: they convey valuable information for effective interpersonal interaction and non-verbal communication. It had been shown that ASD children aged 8–18 years identify substantially fewer depictions of face-like objects as faces in a sequence of ambiguous stimuli[30] Both adolescents and adults with ASD showed preferential detection of upright protofaces (schematic faces) under continuous flash suppression stimuli[31, 32] That if in autistic individuals face tuning is deficient because of weakened configural face processing, they would experience more difficulties on the Face-n-Food task than TD controls This task benefits from using unfamiliar ‘face’ images that is of importance in clinical settings[37]. TD adults and children possess an entire bias for seeing faces in Arcimboldo-like images

Methods

Results

Conclusion