Familiar face recognition in children with autism; the differential use of inner and outer face parts.
School-age kids with autism recognize familiar faces as well as peers—skip face-memory drills and target other social skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team showed kids photos of people they knew.
Some kids had autism, some had delays, and some were typical.
Everyone tried to pick out the familiar faces from new ones.
What they found
All groups scored the same.
Kids with autism recognized Mom, teachers, and friends just as well as other kids.
There was no special face-memory problem tied to autism.
How this fits with other research
Sterling et al. (2008) saw the same thing the next year.
They tracked eye gaze and still found equal accuracy, so the result holds.
Bradshaw et al. (2011) looks like a clash: preschoolers with autism failed a face task.
The gap is age. Rebecca et al. tested older kids; Jessica et al. tested 3- to 5-year-olds.
Very young children with autism may need extra time to learn faces, but the gap closes.
Anthony et al. (2020) adds a twist: within autism, kids who look less at people also score lower on face tasks.
Attention, not memory, may drive the differences we see.
Why it matters
You can stop drilling familiar-face flashcards.
If a learner knows the person, they can pick them out.
Spend your minutes teaching new names, emotions, or eye-contact goals instead.
For preschoolers, give more chances to practice, but expect the skill to catch up.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We investigated whether children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) have a deficit in recognising familiar faces. Children with ASD were given a forced choice familiar face recognition task with three conditions: full faces, inner face parts and outer face parts. Control groups were children with developmental delay (DD) and typically developing (TD) children. Children with ASD and children with DD recognised slightly fewer faces than did TD children, but there was no ASD-specific deficit. All groups displayed the dame pattern of face part superiority: full-face superiority over inner face, and inner face superiority over outer face. Thererfore, the pattern of familiar face recognition by children with ASD was similar to the pattern found in other children.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2007 · doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0169-z