A normed study of face recognition in autism and related disorders.
Young kids with autism show a sharp, specific face-recognition gap that lingers and shapes later social choices.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Feldman et al. (1999) gave a standard face-recognition test to young children with autism. They compared scores to kids with other delays and to typically developing kids. All groups had similar IQ and language levels.
What they found
Children with autism scored far below the other groups. The gap was large and could not be explained by general thinking or talking skills. Face memory itself was the weak spot.
How this fits with other research
Ewing et al. (2015) later showed the same kids also ignore how trustworthy a face looks when deciding whom to trust. The face problem does not go away with age; it just shows up in new social choices.
Grainger et al. (2017) looked at a different memory task—remembering actions instead of faces—and found no autism deficit. The trouble is specific to faces, not to all memory.
Barrett et al. (2004) used the same design but tested joint attention and play. They found autism stood out there too. Together these papers map a clear social-cognitive profile: weak face skills plus weak shared-attention skills, even when language and IQ are matched.
Why it matters
If a child with autism knows the words but still seems lost in social settings, check face recognition. Add face-memory games or use labeled photos of peers before group work. Targeting this one skill may boost name learning, friendship picks, and later trust decisions.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Although the interpretation of studies of face recognition in older children, adolescents, and adults with autism is complicated by the fact that participating samples and adopted methodologies vary significantly, there is nevertheless strong evidence indicating processing peculiarities even when task performance is not deficient. Much less is known about face recognition abilities in younger children with autism. This study employed a well-normed task of face recognition to measure this ability in 102 young children with autism, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDDNOS), and non-PDD disorders (mental retardation and language disorders) matched on chronological age and nonverbal mental age, and in a subsample of 51 children divided equally in the same three groups matched on chronological age and verbal mental age. There were pronounced deficits of face recognition in the autistic group relative to the other nonverbally matched and verbally matched groups. Performance on two comparison tasks did not reveal significant differences when verbal ability was adequately controlled. We concluded that young children with autism have face recognition deficits that cannot be attributed to overall cognitive abilities or task demands. In contrast to controls, there was a lower correlation between performance on face recognition and nonverbal intelligence, suggesting that in autism face recognition is less correlated with general cognitive capacity. Contrary to our expectation, children with PDDNOS did not show face recognition deficits.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1999 · doi:10.1023/a:1022299920240