Impaired grouping of ambient facial images in autism

Gehdu, B. K., Gray, K. L.H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6071-4588 and Cook, R. (2022) Impaired grouping of ambient facial images in autism. Scientific Reports, 12. 6665. ISSN 2045-2322 doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-10630-0

Abstract/Summary

Ambient facial images depict individuals from a variety of viewing angles, with a range of poses and expressions, under different lighting conditions. Exposure to ambient images is thought to help observers form robust representations of the individuals depicted. Previous results suggest that autistic people may derive less benefit from exposure to this exemplar variation than non-autistic people. To date, however, it remains unclear why. One possibility is that autistic individuals possess atypical perceptual learning mechanisms. Alternatively, however, the learning mechanisms may be intact, but receive low-quality perceptual input from face encoding processes. To examine this second possibility, we investigated whether autistic people are less able to group ambient images of unfamiliar individuals based on their identity. Participants were asked to identify which of four ambient images depicted an oddball identity. Each trial assessed the grouping of different facial identities, thereby preventing face learning across trials. As such, the task assessed participants’ ability to group ambient images of unfamiliar people. In two experiments we found that matched non-autistic controls correctly identified the oddball identities more often than our autistic participants. These results imply that poor face learning from variation by autistic individuals may well be attributable to low-quality perceptual input, not aberrant learning mechanisms per se.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/104736
Identification Number/DOI	10.1038/s41598-022-10630-0
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Psychopathology and Affective Neuroscience Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Perception and Action
Publisher	Nature Publishing Group
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