Griffin Jason W, Webb Sara Jane, Keehn Brandon, Dawson Geraldine, McPartland James C
Yale Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA.
Center of Child Health, Behavior and Development, Seattle Children's Research Institute, Seattle, USA.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Mar 2. doi: 10.1007/s10803-024-06259-9.
Visual face recognition-the ability to encode, discriminate, and recognize the faces of others-is fundamentally supported by eye movements and is a common source of difficulty for autistic individuals. We aimed to evaluate how visual processing strategies (i.e., eye movement patterns) directly support encoding and recognition of faces in autistic and neurotypical (NT) individuals.
We used a hidden Markov modeling approach to evaluate the spatiotemporal dynamics of eye movements in autistic (n = 15) and neurotypical (NT) adolescents (n = 17) during a face identity recognition task.
We discovered distinct eye movement patterns among all participants, which included a focused and exploratory strategy. When evaluating change in visual processing strategy across encoding and recognition phases, autistic individuals did not shift their eye movement patterns like their NT peers, who shifted to a more exploratory visual processing strategy during recognition.
These findings suggest that autistic individuals do not modulate their visual processing strategy across encoding and recognition of faces, which may be an indicator of less efficient face processing.
视觉人脸识别——对他人面部进行编码、辨别和识别的能力——从根本上受到眼动的支持，并且是自闭症个体常见的困难来源。我们旨在评估视觉加工策略（即眼动模式）如何直接支持自闭症个体和神经典型（NT）个体对面部的编码和识别。
我们采用隐马尔可夫建模方法，评估自闭症青少年（n = 15）和神经典型（NT）青少年（n = 17）在面部身份识别任务期间眼动的时空动态。
我们在所有参与者中发现了不同的眼动模式，其中包括一种聚焦和探索性策略。在评估编码和识别阶段视觉加工策略的变化时，自闭症个体不像他们的NT同龄人那样改变眼动模式，NT同龄人在识别过程中转向了更具探索性的视觉加工策略。
这些发现表明，自闭症个体在对面部进行编码和识别时不会调节其视觉加工策略，这可能是面部加工效率较低的一个指标。
