Christine Deruelle

Motion and Emotion: A Novel Approach to the Study of Face Processing by Young Autistic Children

The specificity of facial processing impairment in autistic children, particularly in the domain of emotion, is still debated. The aim of our study was to assess the influence of motion on facial expression recognition in young autistic children. Thirteen autistic children (M age: 69.38 months) were matched for gender and developmental level with a control group of 13 normal children (M age: 40.53 months). They were compared on their ability to match videotaped “still,” “dynamic,” and “strobe” emotional and nonemotional facial expressions with photographs. Results indicate that children with autism do not perform significantly worse than their controls in any of our experimental conditions. Compared to previous studies showing lower performance in autistic than in control children when presented with static faces, our data suggest that slow dynamic presentations facilitate facial expression recognition by autistic children. This result could be of interest to parents and specialists involved in education and reeducation of these children.

Processing of global and local visual information and hemispheric specialization in humans (Homo sapiens) and baboons (Papio papio)

Global precedence was examined in 8 baboons and 14 humans using compound stimuli presented in the left visual hemifield (LVF) or the right visual hemifield (RVF). Humans showed a global advantage and global-to-local interference. Baboons showed a local advantage and no interference. For humans and baboons, a LVF advantage appeared for global matching and an unsignificant RVF advantage appeared for local matching. The local advantage in baboons still emerged when the memory load of the task was removed and when the local elements were connected by lines or were adjacent. Moreover, global precedence in humans persisted with unfamiliar forms. Species differences suggest that global precedence is not a universal trait and that this effect in humans does not have a purely perceptual or sensory basis.

Emotion Understanding in Children with ADHD

Several studies suggest that children with ADHD tend to perform worse than typically developing children on emotion recognition tasks. However, most of these studies have focused on the recognition of facial expression, while there is evidence that context plays a major role on emotion perception. This study aims at further investigating emotion processing in children with ADHD, by assessing not only facial emotion recognition (Experiment 1) but also emotion recognition on the basis of contextual cues (Experiment 2). Twenty-seven children and adolescents with ADHD were compared to age-matched typically developing controls. Importantly, findings of this study show that emotion-processing difficulties in children with ADHD extend beyond facial emotion and also affect the recognition of emotions on the basis of contextual information. Our data thus indicate that children with ADHD have an overall emotion-processing deficit.

Recognition of biological motion in children with autistic spectrum disorders

It is widely accepted that autistic children experience difficulties in processing and recognizing emotions. Most relevant studies have explored the perception of faces. However, context and bodily gestures are also sources from which we derive emotional meanings. We tested 23 autistic children and 23 typically developing control children on their ability to recognize point-light displays of a persons actions, subjective states and emotions. In a control task, children had to recognize point-light displays of everyday objects. The children with autism only differed from the control children in their ability to name the emotional point-light displays. This suggests that children with autism can extract complex meanings from bodily movements but may be less sensitive to higher-order emotional information conveyed by human movement. The results are discussed in the context of a specific deficit in emotion perception in children with autism.

Attention to low-and high-spatial frequencies in categorizing facial identities, emotions and gender in children with autism

This study was aimed at investigating face categorization strategies in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Performance of 17 children with ASD was compared to that of 17 control children in a face-matching task, including hybrid faces (composed of two overlapping faces of different spatial bandwidths) and either low- or high-pass filtered faces. Participants were asked to match faces on the basis of identity, emotion or gender. Results revealed that children with ASD used the same strategies as controls when matching faces by gender. By contrast, in the identity and the emotion conditions, children with ASD showed a high-pass bias (i.e., preference for local information), contrary to controls. Consistent with previous studies on autism, these findings suggest that children with ASD do use atypical (local-oriented) strategies to process faces.

Visual search for global/local stimulus features in humans and baboons

Fagot and Deruelle (1997) demonstrated that, when tested with identical visual stimuli, baboons exhibit an advantage in processing local features, whereas humans show the “global precedence” effect initially reported by Navon (1977). In the present experiments, we investigated the cause of this species difference. Humans and baboons performed a visual search task in which the target differed from the distractors at either the global or the local level. Humans responded more quickly to global than to local targets, whereas baboons did the opposite (Experiment 1). Human response times (RTs) were independent of display size, for both local and global processing. Baboon RTs increased linearly with display size, more so for global than for local processing. The search slope for baboons disappeared for continuous targets (Experiment 2). That effect was not due to variations in stimulus luminance (Experiment 3). Finally, variations in stimulus density affected global search slopes in baboons but not in humans (Experiment 4). Overall, results suggest that perceptual grouping operations involved during the processing of hierarchical stimuli are attention demanding for baboons, but not for humans.

Electrodermal reactivity to emotion processing in adults with autistic spectrum disorders

Although alterations of emotion processing are recognized as a core component of autism, the level at which alterations occur is still debated. Discrepant results suggest that overt assessment of emotion processing is not appropriate. In this study, skin conductance response (SCR) was used to examine covert emotional processes. Both behavioural responses and SCRs of 16 adults with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) were compared to those of 16 typical matched adults. Participants had to judge emotional facial expressions, the age of faces or the direction of a moving object. Although behavioural performance was similar in the two populations, individuals with an ASD exhibited lower SCRs than controls in the emotional judgement task. This suggests that such individuals may rely on different strategies due to altered autonomic processing. Furthermore, failure to produce normal physiological reactions to emotional faces may be related to social impairments in individuals with an ASD.

Do the right and left hemispheres attend to the same visuospatial information within a face in infancy

Four‐ to 10‐month‐old infants process different information within geometrical patterns with each of the 2 hemispheres (Deruelle & de Schonen 1991,1995). This study was designed to test whether this early difference between the hemispheres’ modes of processing also holds in the case of face processing. Four‐ to 10‐month‐old participants had to discriminate and recognize with each hemi‐visual field the 2 members of a pair of faces. There were 3 pairs of faces that differed by either eye shape, eye size, or eye orientation. The results confirmed the predictions made on the basis of adult studies and infants’ hemispheric differences in geometrical pattern processing: A left hemisphere advantage was observed in the case of the 1st pair of faces and a right hemisphere advantage with the 2nd and 3rd pairs. It is suggested that the early right hemisphere advantage over the left observed by de Schonen and Mathivet (1990) in face recognition by 4‐ to 9‐month‐old infants may be mainly based on the difference in the...

Disrupting the right prefrontal cortex alters moral judgement

Humans daily face social situations involving conflicts between competing moral decision. Despite a substantial amount of studies published over the past 10 years, the respective role of emotions and reason, their possible interaction, and their behavioural expression during moral evaluation remains an unresolved issue. A dualistic approach to moral evaluation proposes that the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFc) controls emotional impulses. However, recent findings raise the possibility that the right DLPFc processes emotional information during moral decision making. We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to transiently disrupt rDLPFc activity before measuring decision making in the context of moral dilemmas. Results reveal an increase of the probability of utilitarian responses during objective evaluation of moral dilemmas in the rTMS group (compared to a SHAM one). This suggests that the right DLPFc function not only participates to a rational cognitive control process, but also integrates emotions generated by contextual information appraisal, which are decisive for response selection in moral judgements.

Processing of compound visual stimuli by children with autism and Asperger syndrome

A typical modes of visual processing are common in individuals with autism. In particular, and unlike typically developing children, children with autism tend to process the parts of a complex object as a priority, rather than attending to the object as a whole. This bias for local processing is likely to be due to difficulties in assembling subparts into a coherent whole, as proposed by Frith (1989) using the term “weak central coherence” or WCC. This study was aimed to better characterize the processing of complex visual stimuli by children with autism. Thirteen children with autistic spectrum disorders were individually paired with children of two control groups, one matched on verbal mental age (VMA) and one matched on chronological age (CA). Participants from the three groups were tested in two tasks. The first task involved hierarchical global/local stimuli, inspired by Navon (1977). The second task employed compound face‐like or geometrical stimuli. This task emphasized the processing of configural...