Wolf Julie M, Tanaka James W, Klaiman Cheryl, Cockburn Jeff, Herlihy Lauren, Brown Carla, South Mikle, McPartland James, Kaiser Martha D, Phillips Rebecca, Schultz Robert T
Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Autism Res. 2008 Dec;1(6):329-40. doi: 10.1002/aur.56.
Although it has been well established that individuals with autism exhibit difficulties in their face recognition abilities, it has been debated whether this deficit reflects a category-specific impairment of faces or a general perceptual bias toward the local-level information in a stimulus. In this study, the Let's Face It! Skills Battery [Tanaka & Schultz, 2008] of developmental face- and object-processing measures was administered to a large sample of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The main finding was that when matched for age and IQ, individuals with ASD were selectively impaired in their ability to recognize faces across changes in orientation, expression and featural information. In a face discrimination task, ASD participants showed a preserved ability to discriminate featural and configural information in the mouth region of a face, but were compromised in their ability to discriminate featural and configural information in the eyes. On object-processing tasks, ASD participants demonstrated a normal ability to recognize automobiles across changes in orientation and a superior ability to discriminate featural and configural information in houses. These findings indicate that the face-processing deficits in ASD are not due to a local-processing bias, but reflect a category-specific impairment of faces characterized by a failure to form view-invariant face representations and discriminate information in the eye region of the face.
尽管已有充分证据表明，患有自闭症的个体在面部识别能力方面存在困难，但对于这种缺陷是反映了对面部的特定类别损伤，还是对刺激中局部水平信息的一般感知偏差，一直存在争议。在本研究中，对大量被诊断为自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的儿童和发育正常的儿童进行了《让我们面对它！技能组合》[田中 & 舒尔茨，2008]中关于面部和物体加工的发育测量。主要发现是，在年龄和智商匹配的情况下，患有ASD的个体在识别面部方向、表情和特征信息变化时的能力存在选择性损伤。在面部辨别任务中，ASD参与者在辨别面部口部区域的特征和构型信息方面能力保留，但在辨别眼部特征和构型信息方面能力受损。在物体加工任务中，ASD参与者在识别汽车方向变化方面能力正常，在辨别房屋特征和构型信息方面能力较强。这些发现表明，ASD中的面部加工缺陷并非由于局部加工偏差，而是反映了对面部的特定类别损伤，其特征是无法形成视角不变的面部表征，以及无法辨别面部眼部区域中的信息。
