Faces are arguably the most important objects in our social environment, providing the primary means by which we identify one another as well as a vital medium for communication. The proposed study is designed to investigate face recognition abilities and processes in autism. Two primary aims guide this study.
Aim 1 is to determine if children with autism are specifically impaired in their ability to encode and recognize unfamiliar human faces (a) relative to non-autistic children and (b) relative to their own ability to process comparably complex nonfacial stimuli.
Aim 2 is to provide a direct test of the hypothesis that children with autism rely to an abnormal extent on piecemeal face-processing strategies whereby they encode and remember faces primarily in terms of their component parts rather than as wholes. These issues will be addressed by systematically comparing recognition of unfamiliar faces with recognition of a range of comparably complex control stimuli (inverted faces, scrambled faces, houses) using a part-whole methodology (Tanaka and Farah, 1993) which reasons that if faces are encoded holistically, an individual component (e.g., the mouth) of a previously exposed face will be recognized more readily in the context of the whole face than in isolation. Participants will include 30 children with autism, ranging from 8 to 12 years in CA and with nonverbal IQs above 60, and 30 non-autistic children with mental retardation and/or learning disabilities, matched with the autistic participants on CA, nonverbal IQ, and receptive vocabulary. Part- and whole-recognition of normal, upright faces will be compared with part- and whole-recognition of inverted faces, scrambled faces, and houses in three separate tasks using both accuracy and speed of recognition as dependent measures. Given the importance of face recognition to social functioning, a systematic investigation of this understudied topic can help to provide a clearer picture of the key social-cognitive deficits in autism and their underlying neuropsychology. This research can thus potentially help to refine diagnostic criteria for autism as well as contribute to the formulation of social-cognitive interventions for children with autism.
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