The salience of facial expression for autistic children

Autistic and non-autistic retarded children who were matched for verbal ability were shown 'standard' pairs of photographs of people who differed in three, two or one of the following respects: sex, age, facial expression of emotion, and the type of hat they were wearing. When given similar photographs to sort, the majority of non-autistic children sorted according to people's facial expressions before they sorted according to type of hat, but most autistic children gave priority to sorting by type of hat, and many neglected the facial expressions altogether. It is suggested that these results reflect autistic children's insensitivity to other people's facial expressions of emotion.