Visual attention, emotional and behavioral responses to facial expression in young children with autism

Abstract

The current study investigated the differential attentive, emotional and behavioral responses to facial expressions in toddlers with autism (N = 37) and healthy controls (N = 40) using a task capturing visual attention, emotional response and joint attention behavior to facial expression. The findings showed that autistic children's performances were significantly worse than healthy children. These preliminary findings suggest that children with autism not only show less visual attention to facial expression than healthy children but also have impairments in social attention. A fine-grained analysis showed that children with autism, but not healthy children, showed abnormal emotional responses to the negative facial expressions. The results are discussed in terms of cognitive deficits in facial expression in young children of autism.