The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the social-communicative abilities of children with autism as revealed through their capacity to process information from people?s faces. In recent research, we found that children with autism engage in atypical face recognition strategies that involve an unusual reliance on the mouth, and deficient processing of the eyes. We plan to extend this work by investigating the entire range of face perception abilities in autism, including perception of face identity, facial expressions of emotion, eye gaze direction, and facial speech. A series of experiments will be conducted with autistic children aged 10-1 6 and with NVIQ>70; an age- and NVIQ-matched, language-impaired control group, and an age-matched normal control group. The main predictions are that: (1) In face identification, children with autism will exhibit impaired eye recognition even when they are cued to attend to the eye region, and will exhibit impaired processing of eyes but intact processing of mouths across measures of holistic face recognition. (2) They will show a similar pattern of deficiency in the perception of facial emotions, with intact recognition of emotions expressed via the mouth, but impaired recognition of emotions expressed primarily through the eyes. (3) They will be impaired in following eye gaze and in judging eye gaze direction. (4) They will be less proficient at reading visual speech cues from the eyes than from the mouth. Across experiments, our goal is to assess how impairments in different aspects of face perception may be related in autism. In addition, we will assess the relationship of all experimental face perception variables to visual scanning patterns; lower-level visual perception abilities; and concurrent social-communicative functioning. In its broad focus on all aspects of face processing, this research will provide a systematic delineation of autistic impairments in a vital channel of communication, and will thus contribute to a better understanding of autism?s core symptomatology. Further, in investigating a range of face processing skills that have been intensively studied on the neuroanatomical level, this research can contribute to the elucidation of the brain bases of autism and its genetic etiology.
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