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Investigations of face expertise in the social developmental disorders

From the Department of Neurology (J.J.S.B., R.L.H., M.V.C., D.S.M.), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA; Division of Neurology and Departments of Psychology, Ophthalmology, and Visual Sciences (J.J.S.B.), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; and Department of Psychiatry (D.S.M.), Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Boston.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Jason J.S. Barton, Neuro-ophthalmology Section D, VGH Eye Care Center, 2550 Willow Street, Vancouver, BC Canada V5Z 3N9 jasonbarton{at}shaw.ca

Background: Patients with social developmental disorders (SDD), also known as autism spectrum disorders, may have impaired recognition of facial identity or facial expressions.

Objective: Our goal was to determine whether SDDs were characterized by loss of a perceptual mechanism responsible for face expertise, as current theories suggest that such a loss should be selective for upright faces, disproportionately affect the perception of facial configuration, and possibly be more severe in the eye region.

Method: We tested a group of 24 adult patients with SDD with an oddity paradigm that required them to detect changes in facial configuration or feature color, in either the eyes or the mouth, in both upright and inverted faces.

Results: One group of subjects with SDD with normal famous face recognition had only a mild reduction in accuracy and a normal pattern of inversion effects. A second group of subjects with SDD with impaired famous face recognition had a severe reduction of accuracy. This deficit was not limited to upright faces. It affected the perception of feature configuration and feature color to a similar degree and both eye and mouth changes were discriminated poorly in upright faces.

Conclusion: The impaired face recognition that is present in a subset of patients with social developmental disorders is accompanied by impaired face perception, and this impairment is not exclusive to upright faces, facial configuration, or the eye region. The reduced face processing skills in these subjects may be more consistent with recent computational models of face expertise than with classic dual-route hypotheses.

Supported by NIMH grant 1R01 MH069898, CIHR grant MOP-77615, the Canada Research Chair program, and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Senior Scholarship to J.B.

Disclosure: The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Received June 16, 2006. Accepted in final form April 2, 2007.