FACE RECOGNITION PROCESSES IN AUTISM

自闭症患者的面部识别过程

• 批准号: 6401590
• 负责人: ROBERT M JOSEPH
• 金额: $ 6.98万
• 依托单位: UNIV OF MASSACHUSETTS MED SCH WORCESTER
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-07-01 至 2001-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6401590
• 关键词: autism; clinical research; cognition; face; face expression; human subject; memory; middle childhood (6-11); neural information processing; neuropsychological tests; neuropsychology; perception

Faces are arguably the most important objects in our social environment, providing the primary means by which we identify one another as well as a vital medium for communication. The proposed study is designed to investigate face recognition abilities and processes in autism. Two primary aims guide this study. Aim 1 is to determine if children with autism are specifically impaired in their ability to encode and recognize unfamiliar human faces (a) relative to non-autistic children and (b) relative to their own ability to process comparably complex nonfacial stimuli. Aim 2 is to provide a direct test of the hypothesis that children with autism rely to an abnormal extent on piecemeal face-processing strategies whereby they encode and remember faces primarily in terms of their component parts rather than as wholes. These issues will be addressed by systematically comparing recognition of unfamiliar faces with recognition of a range of comparably complex control stimuli (inverted faces, scrambled faces, houses) using a part-whole methodology (Tanaka and Farah, 1993) which reasons that if faces are encoded holistically, an individual component (e.g., the mouth) of a previously exposed face will be recognized more readily in the context of the whole face than in isolation. Participants will include 30 children with autism, ranging from 8 to 12 years in CA and with nonverbal IQs above 60, and 30 non-autistic children with mental retardation and/or learning disabilities, matched with the autistic participants on CA, nonverbal IQ, and receptive vocabulary. Part- and whole-recognition of normal, upright faces will be compared with part- and whole-recognition of inverted faces, scrambled faces, and houses in three separate tasks using both accuracy and speed of recognition as dependent measures. Given the importance of face recognition to social functioning, a systematic investigation of this understudied topic can help to provide a clearer picture of the key social-cognitive deficits in autism and their underlying neuropsychology. This research can thus potentially help to refine diagnostic criteria for autism as well as contribute to the formulation of social-cognitive interventions for children with autism.

面孔可以说是我们社会环境中最重要的物体，它提供了我们相互识别的主要手段以及沟通的重要媒介。 拟议的研究旨在调查自闭症患者的面部识别能力和过程。 这项研究有两个主要目标。 目标 1 是确定自闭症儿童（a）相对于非自闭症儿童和（b）相对于他们自己处理相对复杂的非面部刺激的能力，编码和识别不熟悉的人脸的能力是否受到特别损害。 目标 2 是对以下假设进行直接检验：自闭症儿童异常依赖于零碎的面部处理策略，他们主要根据面部的组成部分而不是整体来编码和记忆面部。 这些问题将通过使用部分整体方法（Tanaka 和 Farah，1993）系统地将对陌生面孔的识别与对一系列相对复杂的控制刺激（倒置的面孔、乱序的面孔、房屋）的识别进行比较来解决，这表明如果面孔是整体编码后，先前暴露的脸部的单个部分（例如嘴）在整个脸部的背景下比孤立地更容易被识别。 参与者将包括 30 名自闭症儿童，CA 年龄从 8 岁到 12 岁，非语言智商超过 60，以及 30 名智力低下和/或学习障碍的非自闭症儿童，与 CA、非语言智商和非语言智商的自闭症参与者相匹配。接受性词汇。 将在三个单独的任务中将正常、直立面部的部分和整体识别与倒置面部、乱序面部和房屋的部分和整体识别进行比较，使用识别的准确性和速度作为依赖测量。鉴于面部识别对社会功能的重要性，对这一尚未充分研究的主题进行系统调查有助于更清楚地了解自闭症的关键社会认知缺陷及其潜在的神经心理学。 因此，这项研究可能有助于完善自闭症的诊断标准，并有助于制定自闭症儿童的社会认知干预措施。