Perception of human and nonhuman facial age by developmentally disabled children.
Autistic kids may stumble on age judgments in animal or cartoon faces, so vet your visual stimuli before teaching.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked autistic kids, kids with intellectual disability, and kids with other delays to judge the age of faces. Some faces were human photos. Others were cartoon dog or cat faces.
The team wanted to know if autistic children read age cues differently when the face was not human.
What they found
Autistic children had extra trouble guessing age only on the animal faces. The other clinical groups did fine on both kinds.
The result points to a special, not global, face-processing hiccup in autism.
How this fits with other research
Milne et al. (2009) later saw a similar pattern. Autistic kids copied flat line drawings with less 3-D depth, yet drew real objects like peers. Both studies show the task format, not the skill, drives the difference.
Mueller et al. (2000) paired photos with a false-belief story and found no boost for autistic children. Together the papers warn that simply adding pictures does not guarantee better social understanding.
Baltazar et al. (2021) worked with adults and found autistic performance on the Eyes Test dipped when items were hard or negative. The 2002 kid data and the 2021 adult data line up: subtle face cues remain shaky across age groups.
Why it matters
Check your teaching materials. If your social skills program uses cartoon faces or animal avatars, test first to be sure the learner can read age or emotion in those images. When assessment calls for face judgments, pick human photos for a clearer picture of the child’s true skill. Swap in nonhuman images only after mastery to broaden generalization.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Human and nonhuman faces were shown to clinical controls, autistic, mentally retarded, and language-disordered children to assess their ability to detect and draw inferences about facial age. Children were asked to select from sets of three faces the one that appeared youthful or to select faces that would be associated with some age-related characteristic. In two studies, it was found that, relative to other children, autistic children had more difficulty perceiving youthfulness in nonhuman faces compared with human faces. These data are discussed with respect to differences in mechanisms and processes that may underlie facial information processing in autistic and nonautistic children.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2002 · doi:10.1023/a:1015445629062