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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Oct 21, 2025

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome

Published on: July 31, 2016

Absence of covert face valuation in Autism.

Fabien Vinckier^1,2,3, Mathias Pessiglione^3,4, Baudouin Forgeot d'Arc^5,6,7

¹Université de Paris, F-75006, Paris, France.

Translational Psychiatry

|September 8, 2021

Summary

Autism may involve a lack of spontaneous social valuation, not inattention. Functional neuroimaging reveals autistic individuals may not automatically value social stimuli like faces, unlike controls.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Developmental Psychology
Psychiatry

Background:

Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition marked by social reciprocity deficits.
A social motivation disorder theory suggests reduced attention to and pleasure from social rewards.
Previous experimental validation of this theory yielded mixed results, potentially due to task instruction variations.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if autism involves a spontaneous social valuation deficit, independent of inattention and correctible by explicit instruction.
To use functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to assess covert subjective values for social (faces) and nonsocial (objects) stimuli.
To differentiate spontaneous from instructed valuation in autistic and control participants.

Main Methods:

Functional neuroimaging (fMRI) was employed to measure brain activity.
Participants performed explicit likeability judgments (instructed valuation) and implicit age/size estimations (spontaneous valuation) for faces and objects.
Covert subjective values were readout by analyzing neural activity in key brain regions, particularly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).

Main Results:

Object valuation and instructed face valuation showed similar neural activity patterns in autistic and control groups, peaking in the vmPFC.
Autistic participants exhibited an absence of spontaneous valuation for faces, even when attention was directed for age estimation.
This suggests a specific deficit in the automatic triggering of the brain's valuation system by social stimuli in autism.

Conclusions:

Findings support the hypothesis of a spontaneous social valuation deficit in autism.
Social stimuli may fail to automatically engage the brain's valuation system in autistic individuals.
This deficit is distinct from inattention and can be overcome with explicit instructions, highlighting the role of automaticity in social processing.