Spatial Frequency and Face Processing in Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Brief Report: Recognition of Emotional and Non-emotional Biological Motion in Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

“…Yet, evidence of increasing abilities in recognition of simple actions in point-light displays with age comes from the comparison between Moore et al and Blake et al studies. Also in a similar vein, recent data have reported that perceptual abilities that may be involved in the recognition of point-light displays (such as configural visual processing) evolve with CA in autistic pathology (e.g., Deruelle, Rondan, Gepner, & Tardif, 2004;, 2005. Moreover, the understanding of communicative aspects of other's body movements is one of the symptoms that appears to improve the most between childhood and adulthood in people with autistic pathology (e.g., Fecteau, Mottron, Berthiaume, & Burack, 2003).…”

“…Although several aspects of visual processing such as configural processing are subject to evolution with age (e.g., Deruelle et al, 2004), emotion identification deficits seem to be characteristic of autism during the lifespan. These impairments are not related to the level of functioning, since both low (Moore et al, 1997) and high functioning (the current study) people with autism exhibited similar deficits in recognizing emotional states from point-light displays.…”

Teaching Emotion Recognition Skills to Children with Autism

“…It has been suggested that impaired ability in recognising emotions is part of the more general difficulty that individuals with autism have with "theory-of-mind" skills (Baron- Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985). Many studies have shown that children and adults with autism are impaired in their ability to recognise emotions from facial expressions (Hobson, 1986;Macdonald et al, 1989;Ozonoff, Pennington & Rogers, 1990 (in study 2, but not study 1); Turk and Cornish, 1998;Deruelle, Rondan, Gepner & Tardif, 2004;Begeer, Rieffe, Terwogt and Stockmann, 2006) though some research has failed to replicate these findings (Castelli, 2005).…”

Face and object processing in autism spectrum disorders

“…The combination of impaired face and intact object processing has led to the proposal that individuals with ASD fail to use secondorder configural [Barton et al, 2004;Davies et al, 1994;Teunisse and de Gelder, 2003] or holistic [Deruelle et al, 2004;Joseph and Tanaka, 2003;Lopez et al, 2004;Serra et al, 2003;Teunisse and Degelder, 1994] information for face discrimination, but instead rely on feature processing [Davies et al, 1994;Deruelle et al, 2004;Lahaie et al, 2006;Langdell, 1978]. Additionally, the paired observations of impaired configural processing and intact or superior feature processing have been interpreted by some researchers [Davies et al, 1994;Deruelle et al, 2004] as supporting the weak central coherence theory of ASD, which claims that individuals with ASD have a general cognitive style of focussing on the parts of visual stimuli rather than the contextual whole [Happe and Frith, 2006;Frith, 1983, 1993].…”