Impaired attentional bias toward one's own face in autism spectrum disorder: ERP evidence.
Kids with autism don’t show the normal brain "pop" when they see their own face—plan your social skills lessons accordingly.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers showed kids pictures of their own face and other faces.
They measured brain waves while the kids looked.
They wanted to see if the brain gives a special "pop" when we see ourselves.
The study compared kids with autism to kids without autism.
What they found
Typical kids had a big P3 brain wave when they saw their own face.
Kids with autism did not show this self-face boost.
Their brains treated their own face like any other face.
This suggests weaker self-referential attention in autism.
How this fits with other research
Rojahn et al. (2012) and Griffith et al. (2012) also found missing face bias in autism.
They used dot-probe and eye-tracking, not brain waves.
Together these studies show the face-attention gap is real across methods.
But two adult studies seem to disagree.
Faso et al. (2016) found adults with autism could find faces in crowds just fine.
McGarty et al. (2018) saw normal self-bias in autistic adults too.
The gap likely comes from age.
Kids with autism miss face cues, but adults may learn to compensate.
Why it matters
When you teach self-recognition or social skills, do not assume the child’s brain tags their own face as special.
You may need to make the self-face stand out more.
Use mirrors, photos, or video with extra prompts.
Check that the child links the face to "me" before moving to joint attention or emotion work.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Converging lines of evidence seem to indicate reduced self-referential processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, processing of one's own face has rarely been investigated in the context of ASD. Thus, the aim of the present study was to elucidate the role of attentional biases in the processing of self- and other faces in ASD. To achieve this goal we presented participants with images of their own face, the face of a close-other, and famous and unknown faces in a Stroop-like paradigm. Participants (22 with ASD, 22 typically developing [TD]) were instructed to indicate the color of presented faces while EEG was recorded. Our event-related potential results clearly showed that self-face was associated with larger P3 amplitudes than all other faces in the TD group, thus indicating a strong attentional bias toward one's own face. In the ASD group, P3 to the self-face and the close-other's face did not differ, suggesting similar attentional biases in both cases. In line with these P3 findings, nonparametric cluster-based permutation tests showed an analogous pattern of results: significant clusters for the self-face compared with all other faces in the TD group, and no significant cluster in the ASD group. Overall, our findings revealed impaired attentional bias to one's own face and diminished self versus other differentiation in individuals with ASD. The similar neural underpinnings of the self-face and other faces supports previous findings indicating reduced self-prioritization among individuals with ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2022 · doi:10.1002/aur.2647