Federica Biotti

Can Neurotypical Individuals Read Autistic Facial Expressions? Atypical Production of Emotional Facial Expressions in Autism Spectrum Disorders

The difficulties encountered by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when interacting with neurotypical (NT, i.e. nonautistic) individuals are usually attributed to failure to recognize the emotions and mental states of their NT interaction partner. It is also possible, however, that at least some of the difficulty is due to a failure of NT individuals to read the mental and emotional states of ASD interaction partners. Previous research has frequently observed deficits of typical facial emotion recognition in individuals with ASD, suggesting atypical representations of emotional expressions. Relatively little research, however, has investigated the ability of individuals with ASD to produce recognizable emotional expressions, and thus, whether NT individuals can recognize autistic emotional expressions. The few studies which have investigated this have used only NT observers, making it impossible to determine whether atypical representations are shared among individuals with ASD, or idiosyncratic. This study investigated NT and ASD participants’ ability to recognize emotional expressions produced by NT and ASD posers. Three posing conditions were included, to determine whether potential group differences are due to atypical cognitive representations of emotion, impaired understanding of the communicative value of expressions, or poor proprioceptive feedback. Results indicated that ASD expressions were recognized less well than NT expressions, and that this is likely due to a genuine deficit in the representation of typical emotional expressions in this population. Further, ASD expressions were equally poorly recognized by NT individuals and those with ASD, implicating idiosyncratic, rather than common, atypical representations of emotional expressions in ASD. Autism Res 2016, 9: 262–271.

Quick guideDevelopmental prosopagnosia

A Quick guide to developmental prosopagnosia, a condition definied by problems in recognising faces that, in contrast with acquired prosopagnosia, develop in the absence of manifest brain injury.

Recognition of facial emotion in Developmental Prosopagnosia

Leading models of face perception posit that, after initial structural encoding, separate streams are responsible for the analysis of identity and expression. Interestingly, many individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP), a condition characterized by difficulties recognizing faces, are apparently unimpaired on expression recognition tasks. This pattern of performance is suggestive of a specific deficit in the identity processing stream, rather than a deficit of structural encoding. However, some authors have suggested that this apparent dissociation may reflect the use of expression recognition tasks that lack the necessary sensitivity to detect subtle impairments. The present study sought to investigate emotion recognition in DP using a task that systematically varies judgment difficulty. Sixteen adults with DP and 16 typically developing (TD) controls completed a computer-based emotion recognition task. Stimuli consisted of cropped eye-regions taken from happy, fearful, disgusted, angry, surprised and sad faces. Each source face was morphed with an image of the same actor exhibiting no emotion to obtain three sets of stimuli with varying levels of emotion intensity (100%, 66% and 33%). Results showed that DP and TD observers did not differ in emotion recognition ability at the 100% intensity level. However, as the emotion signal became weaker (in the 66% and 33% conditions), members of the DP group were increasingly likely to exhibit evidence of impairment, relative to members of the control group. Residual perceptual sensitivity, augmented by compensatory strategies, may be sufficient to judge unambiguous expressions to a broadly typical level of performance. However, as tasks become increasingly difficult, perceptual deficits may often be revealed. Where observed, co-occurring deficits of identity and expression recognition are consistent with impaired structural encoding of faces. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.