The autistic child's ability to identify others' faces and their
expressions was investigated in comparison with the ability of non-autistic
children. A study of the children's ability to identify
peers' from isolated facial areas revealed that the autistic children
were abnormally good at this task. Reasons for these findings were
investigated in a series of experiments which revealed that the
autistic children were also abnormally good at recognising inverted
faces and inverted text. The conclusion was drawn that the autistic
children's performance was due to their possessing a perceptual
integration deficit which prevents them seeing stimuli like faces and
words as meaningful wholes. This was investigated further by tests
of their ability to discern facial expression and the results of these
studies supported the above conclusion. Tests of the children's ability
to lip read revealed that the autistic children also had problems with
between modality perceptual integration. Studies of their ability
to produce facial expressions showed them to be poor at both
spontaneous and elicited expressions. Further, whilst they were as
good as controls at copying facial expression, they were less able to
make use of visual feedback to improve their attempts. This was seen
as further evidence for a perceptual integration deficit. Finally, a
computerised study of autistic children's eye movements whilst viewing
live facial expressions and other stimuli supported much of the previous
findings, adding the finding that they had abnormally brief visual
fixation times and that they engaged in very few feature-to-feature
gaze shifts. The results were discussed and found to favour a theory
in which the autistic child's problems with social and communicative
competence are linked to his problems with perceptual integration.
The possession versus the use of abilities was discussed, as was
possible sites of neurological damage, and the possibility that
autistic children lack some vital usually 'innate' abilities and
propensities
