1 Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of British Columbia.
2 Program in Neuroscience, University of British Columbia.
Psychol Sci. 2018 Nov;29(11):1859-1867. doi: 10.1177/0956797618795471. Epub 2018 Oct 4.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulties with processing identity and expression in faces. This is at odds with influential models of face processing that propose separate neural pathways for the identity and expression domains. The social-motivation hypothesis of ASD posits a lack of visual experience with faces as the root cause of face impairments in autism. A direct prediction is that identity and expression abilities should be related in ASD, reflecting the common origin of face impairment in this population. We tested adults with and without ASD ( ns = 34) in identity and expression tasks. Our results showed that performance in the two domains was significantly correlated in the ASD group but not in the comparison group. These results suggest that the most likely origin for face impairments in ASD stems from the input stage impacting development of identity and expression domains alike, consistent with the social-motivation hypothesis.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者在处理面部身份和表情时通常会遇到困难。这与面部处理的有影响力的模型不一致，这些模型提出了身份和表达领域的独立神经途径。ASD 的社会动机假说认为，缺乏对人脸的视觉体验是自闭症中面部损伤的根本原因。一个直接的预测是，身份和表达能力应该在 ASD 中相关，反映出该人群中面部损伤的共同起源。我们在身份和表情任务中测试了有和没有 ASD 的成年人（ns = 34）。我们的结果表明，在 ASD 组中，两个领域的表现显著相关，但在对照组中则不然。这些结果表明，ASD 中面部损伤最可能的起源源于输入阶段，同样影响身份和表达领域的发展，这与社会动机假说一致。
