[Atypical perception processing and facial emotion disorder in autism].

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Clinical Psychology

Background:

• Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by social interaction deficits.
• Difficulties in processing facial and emotional stimuli, including gaze avoidance, are common in ASDs.
• These social and perceptual abnormalities may be interconnected.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate facial emotion perception and representation in children with ASDs.
• To understand the role of local versus global processing in emotional face perception in ASDs.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted with 11 children with ASDs and 11 typically developing controls.
• Experiment 1: Overall emotion discrimination from full facial images.
• Experiment 2: Local emotion discrimination using isolated facial features (eyes, mouths).
• Experiment 3: Emotion construction using facial feature puzzles.

Main Results:

• Typically developing children performed better with overall facial emotion perception.
• Children with ASDs showed superior performance in discriminating emotions from isolated eyes.
• ASD group's performance decreased when overall facial processing was required.

Conclusions:

• Enhanced local information processing may underlie social and emotional perception difficulties in ASDs.
• This local processing bias could contribute to challenges in perceiving the social environment coherently.
• Gaze aversion in ASDs may be linked to stimulus complexity rather than social salience.