On Autistic Face Processing

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http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/con ... 24/10/2059

Apparently the parts of the brain normally used for facial processing are not used or are barely used for facial processing in the autistic. That could arguably relate to some of the face-reading deficiencies.

What intrigues me most is that the autistics processed faces "via a unique neural circuitry". It really is a wide spectrum (which of course calls into question the validity of applying this experiment to all autistics).
The article is arguing that the difference is a result of a lack of experience, since autistics look at faces less.

What do you guys make of this?

I knew there are theories that face perception / visual information processing of faces is different in ASD people compared to NTs.

I have a friend and colleague (PhD in psychology) who has been doing post-PhD/postdoc research on eye movements in ASD children. She has the idea that it isn't just face perception / visual information processing of faces that's different in ASD people, but rather there's a difference between ASD people and NTs on a lower level: there's a difference in eye movement patterns in ASD people compared to NTs in all visual perception / visual information processing, not specific to perception of faces.

I also think there's a difference in visual perception / visual information processing between ASD people and NTs (and maybe/probably more than only visual, also in other modalities), that there's a difference in eye movements and a difference in information processing in the brain which is lower level than what they describe in this article. I think the cause is that our brains work differently and that this is innate, rather than that it would be a matter of having less experience perceiving faces.

In my case, the only thing I noticed is that I always have a hard time finding someone in a crowd. Oh, there was a thread about come face blind test some time ago. I did horribly in that test too.

A study (although with only a very small sample) found that a control group of non-Autistic people could be positively differentiated from a mixed group of Kanner and Asperger type Autistics on the basis of visual acuity. Every subject in the Autism group had visual acuity scores above the range usually construed for human visual acuity. The measured visual acuity of the two groups were distinct (no overlap between the groups).

I also vaguely recall reading an article about research into saccadic eye movement that found differences between Autistic subjects and non-Autistic controls, and particularly concerned with less saccadic eye movement directed toward the eye region of others amongst Autistic subjects when compared to non-Autistic controls.

Without the "theory of mind" reward loop, the whole role of sight in awareness is different. Because its non-formation happens so early, there's an awful lot of development that goes on in the autistic brain under different rules from the normal one.