Sex differences in social perception in children with ASD.
Girls with autism show weaker early brain reactions to faces, and that neural dip pairs with their social symptom load.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team used EEG to watch kids' brains while they looked at faces. They wanted to know if girls and boys with autism show different early brain responses.
They focused on the N170, a quick brain wave that pops when we see a face. They checked if this wave was smaller or slower in girls versus boys with ASD.
What they found
Girls with autism had a weaker N170 response to faces than boys with autism. In girls only, the smaller the brain wave, the more social symptoms the girl had.
Boys with autism did not show this link between brain response and social skill level.
How this fits with other research
Harrop et al. (2018) looked at where kids actually looked with eye-tracking. They found girls with ASD kept typical face-looking habits, while boys looked away more. The two studies seem opposite: one says girls' brains respond less, the other says girls look normally. The gap is method—brain speed versus eye direction—so both can be true.
Pielech et al. (2016) used fMRI in adults and saw only males with ASD had reduced social-brain activity. Our target paper extends this downward to children and shows the female pattern is the outlier.
Costa et al. (2017) also linked shorter face gaze in adult women with ASD to higher social symptoms. Together, these papers say: in females, less face focus—brain or eye—tracks real-life social struggle.
Why it matters
When you screen girls for autism, do not rely only on gaze time; their eyes may stay on faces while their early brain response is still dampened. Add a quick EEG or look at N170 data if available. A small N170 in a girl is a red flag that her social symptoms may be more intense than they appear.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is more common in males than females. An underrepresentation of females in the ASD literature has led to limited knowledge of differences in social function across the sexes. Investigations of face perception represent a promising target for understanding variability in social functioning between males and females. The current study analyzed electrophysiological brain recordings during face perception to investigate sex differences in the neural correlates of face perception and their relationship to social function. Event related potentials (ERP) were recorded from children with ASD while viewing faces, inverted faces, and houses. Relative to males, females showed attenuated response at an ERP marker of face perception, the N170. Among females, but not males, atypical face response was associated with symptom severity. Observed sex differences reflect influential differences in social information processing, and impairment in these features correlates with deficits in social information processing in females, but not males, with ASD. These findings hold significance for future treatment protocols, which should account for differences in males and females with ASD in clinical presentation and neural phenotypes.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2015 · doi:10.1007/s10803-013-2006-5