Gehdu, B.K., Gray, K.L.H., & Cook, R. (2022). Impaired grouping of ambient facial images in autism.

Data (.xlsx) associated with the paper- 'Impaired grouping of ambient facial images in autism' by Bayparvah K Gehdu, Katie L.H Gray, and Richard Coo

Impaired grouping of ambient facial images in autism

Ambient facial images depict individuals from a variety of viewing angles, with a range of poses and expressions, under different lighting conditions. Exposure to ambient images is thought to help observers form robust representations of the individuals depicted. Previous results suggest that autistic people may derive less benefit from exposure to this exemplar variation than non-autistic people. To date, however, it remains unclear why. One possibility is that autistic individuals possess atypical perceptual learning mechanisms. Alternatively, however, the learning mechanisms may be intact, but receive low-quality perceptual input from face encoding processes. To examine this second possibility, we investigated whether autistic people are less able to group ambient images of unfamiliar individuals based on their identity. Participants were asked to identify which of four ambient images depicted an oddball identity. Each trial assessed the grouping of different facial identities, thereby preventing face learning across trials. As such, the task assessed participants’ ability to group ambient images of unfamiliar people. In two experiments we found that matched non-autistic controls correctly identified the oddball identities more often than our autistic participants. These results imply that poor face learning from variation by autistic individuals may well be attributable to low-quality perceptual input, not aberrant learning mechanisms per se

Gehdu, B.K., Press, C., Gray, K.L.H., & Cook, R. (2023). Do autistic adults have insight into their relative face recognition ability?

Data (.xlsx) associated with the paper- 'Do autistic adults have insight into their relative face recognition ability?' by Bayparvah Kaur Gehdu, Clare Press, Katie L.H Gray, and Richard Coo

Poor face recognition predicts social anxiety in autism: a short report

In the present study, we sought to examine whether face recognition problems impact the social anxiety experienced by autistic people. Many autistic people – perhaps between 15% and 30% – exhibit severe face recognition problems that closely resemble developmental prosopagnosia. At present, however, little is known about the psychosocial consequences of these difficulties. Autistic participants (N = 60) with varying degrees of face recognition ability completed two measures of face recognition (the original and Australian variants of the Cambridge Face Memory test), a measure of social anxiety (the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale), and a bespoke survey that enquired about individuals’ experiences of face recognition and social interaction. Relative to autistic individuals with average or above-average face recognition, autistic individuals with poor face recognition described significantly higher levels of social anxiety. Moreover, more than half our participants felt that poor face recognition hampered their social interaction, while over a third thought that poor face recognition had undermined their efforts to make friends. These initial results suggest that poor face recognition may be an important determinant of social anxiety in autism

Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance

The visual processing differences seen in autism often impede individuals’ visual perception of the social world. In particular, many autistic people exhibit poor face recognition. Here, we sought to determine whether autistic adults also show impaired perception of dyadic social interactions – a class of stimulus thought to engage face-like visual processing. Our focus was the perception of interpersonal distance. Participants completed distance change detection tasks in which they had to make perceptual decisions about the distance between two actors. On half of the trials, participants judged whether the actors moved closer together; on the other half, whether they moved further apart. In a non-social control task, participants made similar judgements about two grandfather clocks. We also assessed participants’ face recognition ability using standardized measures. The autistic and non- autistic observers showed similar levels of perceptual sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance when viewing social interactions. As expected, however, the autistic observers showed clear signs of impaired face recognition. Despite putative similarities between the visual processing of faces and dyadic social interactions, our results suggest that these two facets of social vision may dissociate

Autistic adults have insight into their relative face recognition ability

The PI20 is a self-report questionnaire that assesses the presence of lifelong face recognition difficulties. The items on this scale ask respondents to assess their face recognition ability relative to the rest of the population, either explicitly or implicitly. Recent reports suggest that the PI20 scores of autistic participants exhibit little or no correlation with their performance on the Cambridge Face Memory Test – a key measure of face recognition ability. These reports are suggestive of a meta-cognitive deficit whereby autistic individuals are unable to infer whether their face recognition is impaired relative to the wider population. In the present study, however, we observed significant correlations between the PI20 scores of 77 autistic adults and their performance on two variants of the Cambridge Face Memory Test. These findings indicate that autistic individuals can infer whether their face recognition ability is impaired. Consistent with previous research, we observed a wide spread of face recognition abilities within our autistic sample. While some individuals approached ceiling levels of performance, others met the prevailing diagnostic criteria for developmental prosopagnosia. This variability showed little or no association with non-verbal intelligence, autism severity, or the presence of co-occurring alexithymia or ADHD

Recognition of facial expressions in autism: effects of face masks and alexithymia

It is often assumed that the recognition of facial expressions is impaired in autism. However, recent evidence suggests that reports of expression recognition difficulties in autistic participants may be attributable to co-occurring alexithymia – a trait associated with difficulties interpreting interoceptive and emotional states – not autism per se. Due to problems fixating on the eye-region, autistic individuals may be more reliant on information from the mouth region when judging facial expressions. As such, it may be easier to detect expression recognition deficits attributable to autism, not alexithymia, when participants are forced to base expression judgements on the eye-region alone. To test this possibility, we compared the ability of autistic participants (with and without high levels of alexithymia) and non-autistic controls to categorize facial expressions i) when the whole face was visible, and ii) when the lower portion of the face was covered with a surgical mask. High-alexithymic autistic participants showed clear evidence of expression recognition difficulties: they correctly categorised fewer expressions than non-autistic controls. In contrast, low-alexithymic autistic participants were unimpaired relative to non-autistic controls. The same pattern of results was seen when judging masked and unmasked expression stimuli. In sum, we find no evidence for an expression recognition deficit attributable to autism, in the absence of high levels of co-occurring alexithymia, either when participants judge whole-face stimuli or just the eye-region. These findings underscore the influence of co-occurring alexithymia on expression recognition in autism

Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance

The visual processing differences seen in autism often impede individuals’ visual perception of the social world. It has recently been suggested that pairs of individuals shown facing each other – so-called ‘facing dyads’ – engage a form a visual processing similar to that recruited by faces. Given that many autistic people experience difficulties when asked to identify faces, we reasoned that autistic individuals may also make less accurate judgements about facing dyads. We examined whether groups of autistic and non-autistic participants differed in their ability to judge interpersonal distance – a key visual feature of facing dyads. Contrary to our hypothesis, the autistic and non-autistic participants displayed similar ability to detect changes in interpersonal distance. As expected, however, our autistic participants showed worse face recognition than our non-autistic participants. These findings suggest that the visual processing of faces may be selectively impaired in autism without affecting the perception of facing dyads