Atypical recognition of dynamic changes in facial expressions in autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

Previous studies have suggested that the processing of dynamic facial expressions is impaired in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, the specific component that is impaired in the processing of dynamic facial expressions has not been identified. We investigated the recognition of dynamic changes in facial expressions among individuals with ASD and age-and sex-matched typically developing controls. Morphing animations of facial expressions of six emotions were presented at four different changing speeds, and participants rated the naturalness of the expression changes. The correspondence between reduced speeds and decreased naturalness ratings was weaker in the ASD than in the control group. These results suggest that the atypical visual analysis of dynamic changes in facial expressions underlies the impairment in real-life social interaction among individuals with ASD.

Dorsal‐movement and ventral‐form regions are functionally connected during visual‐speech recognition

“…This corroborates the revised theoretical model for dynamic face perception by Bernstein and Yovel (2015) by showing that perception of dynamic facial information involves a brain network consisting of regions not only in the dorsal- Coordinates represent local connectivity maxima in MNI space (in mm) for the whole brain. Second, dysfunction in parts of the dorsal-ventral network might represent a mechanism that may contribute to difficulties in processing dynamic facial information in ASD (e.g., O'Brien, Spencer, Girges, Johnston, & Hill, 2014;Sato et al, 2013;Schelinski et al, 2014). Coordinates written in italics represent clusters that reached significance at p < .05 FWE corrected (peak-level) corrected for the respective ROI, but did not remain significant after Holm-Bonferroni correction for the four ROIs.…”

“…One contributing factor could be deficits in processing social signals such as dynamic faces. Such difficulties have been reported both for facial emotion (Sato, Toichi, Uono, & Kochiyama, 2012;Sato, Uono, & Toichi, 2013), and visual-speech information (Foxe et al, 2015;Schelinski, Riedel, & von Kriegstein, 2014). These deficits are associated with reduced brain responses in ASD in visual sensory cortices (i.e., V5/MT, pSTS/STG [TVSA] and FFA; Borowiak et al, 2018;Pelphrey, Morris, McCarthy, & LaBar, 2007;Sato et al, 2012; but see Kliemann et al, 2018), and also with decreased functional connectivity between the two dorsal-movement pathway regions (Borowiak et al, 2018).…”

“…Such difficulties have been reported both for facial emotion (Sato, Toichi, Uono, & Kochiyama, 2012;Sato, Uono, & Toichi, 2013), and visual-speech information (Foxe et al, 2015;Schelinski, Riedel, & von Kriegstein, 2014). Such difficulties have been reported both for facial emotion (Sato, Toichi, Uono, & Kochiyama, 2012;Sato, Uono, & Toichi, 2013), and visual-speech information (Foxe et al, 2015;Schelinski, Riedel, & von Kriegstein, 2014).…”

A influência da intensidade emocional no reconhecimento de emoções em faces por crianças brasileiras

“…Este foi o principal resultado da presente pesquisa, pois vai ao encontro da hipótese de quanto maior a intensidade emocional, maior a probabilidade de reconhecer uma emoção facial (Recio et al, 2014). Portanto, um instrumento que apresente diferentes níveis de intensidade da emoção deve ser mais sensível para detectar as diferenças entre os indivíduos e, possivelmente, mais ecológico (Paiva-Silva et al, 2016;Sato et al, 2013).…”

Socratic Seminars for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Researchers have named these neurons "mirror neurons", because they "mirror the behavior of others" (Gallese et al, 1996, p. 995). Evidence has been presented that the mirror neurons system of autistic individuals is less actively reading the movements of others (Enticott et al, 2012;Theoret et al, 2005), or their facial expressions of basic emotions (Dapretto et al, 2006;Sato et al, 2013). These findings are supposed to explain the structural and functional difficulties in the brain of children diagnosed with autism to imitate others' actions and to respond to social interaction.…”