Morphing technique reveals intact perception of object motion and disturbed perception of emotional expressions by low-functioning adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Low-functioning teens with ASD track motion instead of emotional faces—use moving stimuli to teach feelings.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Han et al. (2015) watched low-functioning teens with ASD look at short movies. The movies morphed a neutral face into a happy, angry, or sad face. At the same time, a moving object crossed the screen.
The team asked the teens to press a button when they saw the emotion change. Eye cameras tracked where the teens looked.
What they found
The teens spotted the moving object every time. They missed or were late on most emotion changes. Their eyes followed the motion path, not the mouth or eyes of the face.
In plain words: motion cues won, emotion cues lost.
How this fits with other research
Schulte-Rüther et al. (2017) used the same age group and lab set-up. They found automatic facial mimicry was intact. The teens still copied smile or frown muscles, even though Bora’s group showed they did not notice the emotion. The two papers together say: the mirror system works, but the signal never reaches awareness.
Lundqvist (2026) looked at high-functioning ASD adults. They showed reduced facial mimicry. That seems opposite to Bora’s intact motion tracking. The gap closes when you see the groups differ: high-functioning people can choose to mask or suppress mimicry; low-functioning teens simply watch motion instead of faces.
Kikuchi et al. (2022) added live eye contact and found typical heart-rate slowing. Motion cues from real eyes still grab attention. Bora’s lab faces lacked that live motion, so emotion failed to compete.
Why it matters
If you run social skills lessons with low-functioning teens, do not rely on static emotion cards or slow facial drills. Instead, pair targets with motion: move the card, use video game faces, or let the learner control the speed. Teach them to watch the mouth region while the face is moving. Start with object-motion warm-ups to build looking habits, then fade in emotional motion. You will spend less time on prompt dependence and more time on true emotion recognition.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A morphing procedure has been designed to compare directly the perception of emotional expressions and of moving objects. Morphing tasks were presented to 12 low-functioning teenagers with Autism Spectrum Disorder (LF ASD) compared to 12 developmental age-matched typical children and a group presenting ceiling performance. In a first study, when presented with morphed stimuli of objects and emotional faces, LF ASD showed an intact perception of object change of state together with an impaired perception of emotional facial change of state. In a second study, an eye-tracker recorded visual exploration of morphed emotional stimuli displayed by a human face and a robotic set-up. Facing the morphed robotic stimuli, LF ASD displayed equal duration of fixations toward emotional regions and toward mechanical sources of motion, while the typical groups tracked the emotional regions only. Altogether the findings of the two studies suggest that individuals with ASD process motion rather than emotional signals when facing facial expressions.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2015 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2015.09.025