Memory for facial expressions on the autism spectrum: The influence of gaze direction and type of expression.
Autistic people remember faces accurately but miss the usual memory boost from smiles and eye contact.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Macinska et al. (2022) asked autistic and neurotypical adults to look at photos of faces. Each face showed either a happy, angry, or neutral expression. The eyes in each photo looked straight at the viewer or off to the side.
Later, everyone tried to pick out the faces they had seen before. The team checked who remembered best and whether certain expressions or gaze directions helped.
What they found
Both groups remembered the faces equally well overall. Yet only the neurotypical group got a boost from happy faces and from direct eye gaze. The autistic group did not show these usual memory perks.
In short, their memory worked fine, but it ignored the friendly cues that normally make faces stick.
How this fits with other research
McGeown et al. (2013) saw the same missing gaze advantage in autistic youth nine years earlier. Sylwia’s team now shows the pattern holds for adults and also applies to happy expressions.
Twito et al. (2024) adds a twist: autistic adults can learn an emotion pattern but struggle to update it later. Together, the studies paint a picture of rigid facial-emotion memory rather than poor memory.
Schulte-Rüther et al. (2017) found intact automatic mimicry in autistic kids. Pair that with Sylwia’s intact memory and you see the trouble is not early perception; it is the later tuning that never kicks in.
Why it matters
If you teach social skills, do not assume happy faces or eye contact will make your lesson memorable for autistic learners. Add extra prompts, stories, or repetition instead. Check that they can update the lesson when the social cue changes, like when a smile turns to a frown.
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Pair each facial cue with a clear verbal label and extra practice trials.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Face memory research in autism has largely neglected memory for facial expressions, in favor of memory for identity. This study in three experiments examined the role of gaze direction and type of expression on memory for facial expressions in relation to the autism spectrum. In the learning phase, four combinations of facial expressions (joy/anger) and gaze direction (toward/away), displayed by 16 different identities, were presented. In a subsequent surprise test the same identities were presented displaying neutral expressions, and the expression of each identity had to be recalled. In Experiment 1, typically-developed (TD) individuals with low and high Autism Quotient (AQ) scores were tested with three repetitions of each emotion/gaze combination, which did not produce any modulations. In Experiment 2, another group of TD individuals with low and high AQ scores were tested with eight repetitions, resulting in a "happy advantage" and a "direct gaze advantage", but no interactions. In Experiment 3, individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) and a matched TD group were tested using eight repetitions. The HFA group revealed no emotion or gaze effects, while the matched TD group showed both a happy and a direct gaze advantage, and again no interaction. The results suggest that in autistic individuals the memory for facial expressions is intact, but is not modulated by the person's expression type and gaze direction. We discuss whether anomalous implicit learning of facial cues could have contributed to these findings, its relevance for social intuition, and its possible contribution to social deficits in autism. LAY SUMMARY: It has often been found that memory for someone's face (facial identity) is less good in autism. However, it is not yet known whether memory for someone's facial expression is also less good in autism. In this study, the memory for expressions of joy and anger was investigated in typically-developed (TD) individuals who possessed either few or many autistic-like traits (Experiments 1 and 2), and in individuals with high-functioning autism (Experiment 3). The gaze direction was also varied (directed either toward, or away from, the observer). We found that TD individuals best remembered expressions of joy, and remembered expressions of both joy and anger better when the gaze was directed at them. These effects did not depend on the extent to which they possessed autistic-like traits. Autistic participants remembered the facial expression of a previously encountered person as good as TD participants did. However, in contrast to the TD participants, the memory of autistic participants was not influenced by the expression type and gaze direction of the previously encountered persons. We discuss whether this may lead to difficulties in the development of social intuition, which in turn could give rise to difficulties in social interaction that are characteristic for autism.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2022 · doi:10.1002/aur.2682