Hauschild Kathryn M, Felsman Peter, Keifer Cara M, Lerner Matthew D
Social Competence and Treatment Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, United States.
Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, United States.
Front Psychiatry. 2020 Jun 3;11:428. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00428. eCollection 2020.
A common interpretation of the face-processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they arise from a failure to develop normative levels of perceptual expertise. One indicator of perceptual expertise for faces is the own-age bias, operationalized as a processing advantage for faces of one's own age, presumably due to more frequent contact and experience. This effect is especially evident in domains of face recognition memory but less commonly investigated in social-emotional expertise (e.g., facial emotion recognition; FER), where individuals with ASD have shown consistent deficits. In the present study, we investigated whether a FER task would elicit an own-age bias for individuals with and without ASD and explored how the magnitude of an own-age bias may differ as a function of ASD status and symptoms. Ninety-two adolescents (63 male) between the ages of 11 and 14 years completed the child- and adult-face subtests of a standardized FER task. Overall FER accuracy was found to differ by ASD severity, reflecting poorer performance for those with increased symptoms. Results also indicated that an own-age bias was evident, reflecting greater FER performance for child compared to adult faces, for all adolescents regardless of ASD status or symptoms. However, the strength of the observed own-age bias did not differ by ASD status or severity. Findings suggest that face processing abilities of adolescents with ASD may be influenced by experience with specific categories of stimuli, similar to their typically developing peers.
对与自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）相关的面部处理缺陷的一种常见解释是，它们源于未能发展出正常水平的感知专业技能。面部感知专业技能的一个指标是自身年龄偏差，其定义为对自己年龄的面部具有处理优势，这大概是由于更频繁的接触和经验。这种效应在面部识别记忆领域尤为明显，但在社会情感专业技能（例如面部表情识别；FER）方面的研究较少，而患有ASD的个体在这方面一直表现出缺陷。在本研究中，我们调查了FER任务是否会引发患有和未患有ASD的个体出现自身年龄偏差，并探讨了自身年龄偏差的程度如何因ASD状态和症状而有所不同。92名年龄在11至14岁之间的青少年（63名男性）完成了一项标准化FER任务的儿童和成人面部子测试。发现总体FER准确性因ASD严重程度而异，这反映出症状加重的个体表现较差。结果还表明，无论ASD状态或症状如何，所有青少年都存在明显的自身年龄偏差，即与成人面部相比，对儿童面部的FER表现更好。然而，观察到的自身年龄偏差的强度并未因ASD状态或严重程度而有所不同。研究结果表明，患有ASD的青少年的面部处理能力可能会受到特定类别刺激的经验的影响，这与发育正常的同龄人相似。
