Center for Developmental Psychiatry, Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; Leuven Autism Research (LAuRes), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Institute of Research in Psychological Science, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium; Leuven Autism Research (LAuRes), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Neuroimage Clin. 2019;21:101613. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2018.101613. Epub 2018 Nov 28.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by impairments in social communication and interaction. Although difficulties at processing social signals from the face in ASD have been observed and emphasized for many years, there is a lot of inconsistency across both behavioral and neural studies.
We recorded scalp electroencephalography (EEG) in 23 8-to-12 year old boys with ASD and 23 matched typically developing boys using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) paradigm, providing objective (i.e., frequency-tagged), fast (i.e., few minutes) and highly sensitive measures of rapid face categorization, without requiring any explicit face processing task. We tested both the sensitivity to rapidly (i.e., at a glance) categorize faces among other objects and to individuate unfamiliar faces.
While general neural synchronization to the visual stimulation and neural responses indexing generic face categorization were undistinguishable between children with ASD and typically developing controls, neural responses indexing individual face discrimination over the occipito-temporal cortex were substantially reduced in the individuals with ASD. This difference vanished when faces were presented upside-down, due to the lack of significant face inversion effect in ASD.
These data provide original evidence for a selective high-level impairment in individual face discrimination in ASD in an implicit task. The objective and rapid assessment of this function opens new perspectives for ASD diagnosis in clinical settings.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）个体的特征是社交沟通和互动方面的障碍。尽管多年来一直观察到并强调了 ASD 患者在处理面部社交信号方面存在困难，但在行为和神经研究中都存在很大的不一致性。
我们使用快速周期性视觉刺激（FPVS）范式，在 23 名 8 至 12 岁的 ASD 男孩和 23 名匹配的典型发育男孩中记录了头皮脑电图（EEG）。该范式提供了客观的（即频率标记）、快速的（即几分钟内）和高度敏感的快速面孔分类测量，而无需任何明确的面孔处理任务。我们同时测试了在其他物体中快速（即一瞥）分类面孔以及区分不熟悉面孔的能力。
虽然 ASD 儿童和典型发育对照组之间对视觉刺激的一般神经同步性和神经反应索引的通用面孔分类没有区别，但在 ASD 患者的枕颞叶皮层上索引个体面孔辨别能力的神经反应明显降低。当面孔倒置呈现时，这种差异消失了，因为 ASD 中不存在显著的面孔反转效应。
这些数据为 ASD 中个体面孔辨别选择性的高级别损伤提供了原始证据，这是在一项内隐任务中发现的。该功能的客观、快速评估为临床环境中的 ASD 诊断开辟了新的前景。
