Delphine Rosset

Just another face in the crowd: evidence for decreased detection of angry faces in children with Williams syndrome.

The detection of social threat is crucial for adaptive behaviour. Previous studies have shown that angry faces capture attention and are processed more efficiently than happy faces. While this anger superiority effect has been found in typical and atypical development, it is unknown whether it exists in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), who show reduced social fear and atypical sociability. In this study, children with WS searched for angry or happy target faces surrounded by 2, 5 or 8 distracters (happy or angry faces, respectively). Performance was compared to that of mental age-matched controls. Results revealed no group differences for happy faces, however for angry faces, the WS, but not the control group, showed a significant performance decrease for the 8-distracters condition, indicating the absence of an anger superiority effect, in good agreement with evidence for abnormal structure and function in brain areas for social threat processing in WS.

Emotion recognition in children with profound and severe deafness : do they have a deficit in perceptual processing?

Findings from several studies have suggested that deaf children have difficulties with emotion identification and that these may impact upon social skills. The authors of these studies have typically attributed such problems to delayed language acquisition and/or opportunity to converse about personal experiences with other people (Peterson & Siegal, 1995, 1998). The current study aimed to investigate emotion identification in children with varying levels of deafness by specifically testing their ability to recognize perceptual aspects of emotions depicted in upright or inverted human and cartoon faces. The findings from the study showed that, in comparison with both chronological- and mental-age-matched controls, the deaf children were significantly worse at identifying emotions. However, like controls, their performance decreased when emotions were presented on the inverted faces, thus indexing a typical configural processing style. No differences were found across individuals with different levels of deafness or in those with and without signing family members. The results are supportive of poor emotional identification in hearing-impaired children and are discussed in relation to delays in language acquisition and intergroup differences in perceptual processing.

Just another social scene: evidence for decreased attention to negative social scenes in high-functioning autism.

The adaptive threat-detection advantage takes the form of a preferential orienting of attention to threatening scenes. In this study, we compared attention to social scenes in 15 high-functioning individuals with autism (ASD) and matched typically developing (TD) individuals. Eye-tracking was recorded while participants were presented with pairs of scenes, either emotional positive-neutral, emotional negative-neutral or neutral–neutral scenes. Early allocation of attention, the first image fixated in each pair, differed between groups: contrary to TD individuals who showed the typical threat-detection advantage towards negative images, the ASD group failed to show a bias toward threat-related scenes. Later processing of stimuli, indicated by the total fixation to the images during the 3-s presentation, was found unaffected in the ASD group. These results support the hypothesis of an early atypical allocation of attention towards natural social scenes in ASD, that is compensated in later stages of visual processing.

Do children perceive features of real and cartoon faces in the same way? Evidence from typical development and autism

In the current study, typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were presented with a facial-feature discrimination task including both real and cartoon faces, displayed either upright or inverted. Results demonstrated that typically developing children were more accurate at discriminating facial features from upright than from inverted faces and that this effect was specific to real faces. By contrast, children with ASD failed to show such a specific pattern of performance for processing facial features displayed in real faces. Findings of the current study suggest that face type (real vs. cartoon) does not affect perceptual ability in children with ASD as it does in typically developing children.

Mr. Grimace or Ms. Smile Does Categorization Affect Perceptual Processing in Autism

This study compared the influence of categorization on perceptual processing in adults with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and normal control participants. Participants were asked to categorize hybrid faces (composed of two overlapped faces of different spatial bandwidths) by gender and emotion. Control participants exhibited a bias for low-pass information during gender categorization and a bias for high-pass information during emotion categorization. By contrast, adults with ASD showed the same low-pass bias in both tasks. This absence of a shift in processing style in the ASD group is discussed in terms of diminished top-down modulation in autism.

Human Versus Non-Human Face Processing: Evidence from Williams Syndrome

Increased motivation towards social stimuli in Williams syndrome (WS) led us to hypothesize that a face’s human status would have greater impact than face’s orientation on WS’ face processing abilities. Twenty-nine individuals with WS were asked to categorize facial emotion expressions in real, human cartoon and non-human cartoon faces presented upright and inverted. When compared to both chronological and mental age-matched controls, WS participants were able to categorize emotions from human, but not from non-human faces. The use of different perceptual strategies to process human and non-human faces could not explain this dissociation. Rather, the findings suggest an increased sensitivity to socially relevant cues, such as human facial features, possibly related to the hallmark feature of WS—hypersociability.

Anthropomorphic bias found in typically developing children is not found in children with autistic spectrum disorder

The anthropomorphic bias describes the finding that the perceived naturalness of a biological motion decreases as the human-likeness of a computer-animated agent increases. To investigate the anthropomorphic bias in autistic children, human or cartoon characters were presented with biological and artificial motions side by side on a touchscreen. Children were required to touch one that would grow while the other would disappear, implicitly rewarding their choice. Only typically developing controls depicted the expected preference for biological motion when rendered with human, but not cartoon, characters. Despite performing the task to report a preference, children with autism depicted neither normal nor reversed anthropomorphic bias, suggesting that they are not sensitive to the congruence of form and motion information when observing computer-animated agents’ actions.

Effects of motor action on affective preferences in autism spectrum disorders: different influences of embodiment

In the embodied cognition framework, sensory, motor and emotional experiences are encoded along with sensorimotor cues from the context in which information was acquired. As such, representations retain an initial imprint of the manner in which information was acquired. The current study reports results indicating a lack of embodiment effects in ASD and, further, an association between embodiment differences and ASD symptomatology. The current results are consistent with an embodied account of ASD that goes beyond social experiences and could be driven by subtle deficits in sensorimotor coordination.