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Processing in Autism |
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This
project is part of an autism program project that began in 1997. It
is funded by NIDCD, and is part of the Collaborative Programs of Excellence
in Autism. This project’s current funding period extends through
2007.
Project Aims
This research project investigates the social-communicative abilities
of children with autism as revealed through their capacity to process
information from people’s faces. In recent research, we found
that children with autism engage in atypical face recognition strategies
that involve an unusual reliance on the mouth and deficient processing
of the eyes. This work is now being extended by probing the entire
range of face perception abilities in autism, including perception
of face identity, facial expressions of emotion, eye gaze direction,
and facial speech. We are using behavioral, eye-tracking and physiological
measures in these experimental studies of adolescents with autism.
The questions addressed by these studies include:
- Do children with autism show improved eye recognition when they are cued to inspect the eye region of the face during learning trials?
- Do they evidence holistic perception of face identity when feature-based strategies are not available?
- Do they show a similar pattern of deficiency in the holistic perception of facial emotions, with intact recognition of
emotions expressed via the mouth, but impaired recognition of those expressed primarily through the eyes?
- Are they less proficient at reading visual speech from the eyes than from the mouth?
- Are they impaired in following eye gaze and in judging eye gaze direction?
- Are deficits in holistic perception of faces and perception of information from the eye region related or independent?
- What is the pattern of deficits in perception of identity, emotion, gaze, and visual speech in eyes across participants?
Are these deficits related, and is any one deficit more prominent than others?
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