Journal article
Specific Impairment of Face-Processing Abilities in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Using the Let's Face It! Skills Battery
Autism research, Vol.1(6), pp.329-340
12/01/2008
DOI: 10.1002/aur.56
PMCID: PMC4589218
PMID: 19360688
Abstract
Although it has been well established that individuals with autism exhibit difficulties in their face recognition abilities, it has been debated whether this deficit reflects a category-specific impairment of faces or a general perceptual bias toward the local-level information in a stimulus. In this study, the Let's Face It! Skills Battery [Tanaka & Schultz, 2008] of developmental face- and object-processing measures was administered to a large sample of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The main finding was that when matched for age and IQ individuals with ASD were selectively impaired in their ability to recognize faces across changes in orientation, expression and featural information. In a face discrimination task, ASD participants showed a preserved ability to discriminate featural and configural information in the mouth region of a face, but were compromised in their ability to discriminate featural and configural information in the eyes. On object-processing tasks, ASD participants demonstrated a normal ability to recognize automobiles across changes in orientation and a superior ability to discriminate featural and configural information in houses. These findings indicate that the face-processing deficits in ASD are not due to a local-processing bias, but reflect a category-specific impairment of faces characterized by a failure to form view-invariant face representations and discriminate information in the eye region of the face.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Specific Impairment of Face-Processing Abilities in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Using the Let's Face It! Skills Battery
- Creators
- Julie M. Wolf - Yale UniversityJames W. Tanaka - Children's Hospital of PhiladelphiaCheryl Klaiman - Yale UniversityJeff Cockburn - University of VictoriaLauren Herlihy - Yale UniversityCarla Brown - Yale UniversityMikle South - Yale UniversityJames McPartland - Yale UniversityMartha D. Kaiser - University of VictoriaRebecca Phillips - University of VictoriaRobert T. Schultz - Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Autism research, Vol.1(6), pp.329-340
- DOI
- 10.1002/aur.56
- PMID
- 19360688
- PMCID
- PMC4589218
- NLM abbreviation
- Autism Res
- ISSN
- 1939-3792
- eISSN
- 1939-3806
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Number of pages
- 12
- Grant note
- James S. McDonnell Foundation U54MH066494 / NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH; United States Department of Health & Human Services; National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA; NIH National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) NIH; United States Department of Health & Human Services; National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA National Science and Engineering Research Councils of Canada National Science Foundation; National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 12/01/2008
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9984696751802771
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