Perception in autism spectrum disorders : is face processing difficulty domain-specific or domain-general?

Abstract

Face processing studies on children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produced inconsistent conclusions arguing that face-processing difficulties stem from either a high-level socio-cognitive processing atypicalities (domain-specific) or low-level visual processing issue which extends to non-face objects (domain-general). Recently, the repetition suppression (RS) paradigms have been used to explore the issue. However, these studies did not control the visual complexity across the face and non-face stimuli. This study replicated those studies with visual complexity controlled using well-formed and ill-formed emojis. A two-colour judgement task was administered to 22 primary students with ASD and 16 typically-developing (TD) primary students. We found that the ASD group reacted more slowly in general compared to the TD group but showed greater RS from the first repetition instance. Regression analysis showed that higher autistic traits predicted increased RS in the first repetition instance, meaning that ASD children might benefit more from repetition than TD children. It is speculated that visual search strategy used by ASD children might be fundamentally different from that used by TD children, providing further support that face processing issues are domain-general. The clinical implication is that ASD children are capable of learning emojis at a rate close to TD children with repetition.