Is she still angry? Intact learning but no updating of facial expressions priors in autism.

Twito et al. (2024) tested 30 autistic adults and 30 typical adults. All watched a screen that showed the same woman's face. Her expression slowly changed from angry to happy across 100 trials.

First block: the face stayed angry for 80 trials, then slowly turned happy. Second block: the switch point flipped. The team asked, 'Can people update their first impression when the pattern changes?'

Typical adults quickly learned the new average emotion. Autistic adults learned the first average fine, but kept treating the face as mostly angry even after it turned happy. Their brains did not revise the prior.

Eye-tracking showed both groups looked at the mouth and eyes the same amount. The problem was not attention; it was updating the rule.

Begeer et al. (2006) seems to disagree. They showed that autistic kids pay normal attention to emotion faces when you tell them the faces matter for a social game. The key difference: kids in that study only needed to notice the face, not change their mind about it.

Schulte-Rüther et al. (2017) also found automatic facial mimicry intact in autistic youth. Again, automatic copying is not the same as flexible learning. Renana's task targets the later, higher-order step.

Intaitė et al. (2019) used ambiguous figures and found a similar rigidity in autistic adults. When top-down expectations clash with bottom-up data, updating breaks down. The new study shows the same bottleneck happens with real faces and emotions.

If you teach emotion recognition, do not assume one demonstration is enough. Give extra trials after the emotion changes, state the new rule out loud, and use visual cues like color borders. These scaffolds can help clients revise their first impression instead of staying stuck on it.