Characteristics Of Face Expression Recognition In ASD Children

Expression recognition is a necessary condition for social interaction. Normal people exchange information, communicate and judge emotion through the observation of others’ eye of others. Recent studies have found that ASD children have cognitive disorders in facial expression. Some behavioral and visual scanning study revealed the characteristics of expression recognition in autism that they took a local processing while others found these study results controversial. In order to explore the characteristics and processing methods of facial expression recognition in ASD children, this study used global weakened and locally weakened information, to get the behavioral and visual scanning features of children with ASD aging12-16.The results show that (1) In watching pictures of real human faces, ASD children show better expression recognition in happy, and sad expression than in anger and fear expression. Duration of gaze in happy and sad expression is longer than duration of anger and fear. Duration of gaze in anger expression is longer than the expression of fear. When watching the happy and sad expressions, there is no difference in the duration of gaze at the eyes and mouth. When watching the fear and anger expressions, the duration of gaze at eyes is lower than at mouth.(2) With the weakening of the global information, the correctness of recognition decline while the duration of gaze at emotional pictures rise. And the duration of gaze at mouth rise while the duration of gaze at eyes decline.(3) The weakening in eye information reduce correctness of recognizing happy, sad, angry expression in ASD children, but not significantly affect the fear expression recognition. When the eye information weakened, the durations of gazing eye in all four expressions are lower than that of gazing mouth in ASD children. ASD children accordingly moved their attention to mouth when eye information declines.(4) The weakening in mouth information reduce correctness of recognizing all four expressions in ASD children. ASD children accordingly moved their attention to eye when mouth information declines.(5) In happy and sad expression recognition, the impacts of weakening eye and mouth are consistent. In fear and anger expression recognition, the impact of weakening mouth is larger than that of eye.After a comprehensive analysis of the behavioral characteristics and visual scanning features, it is suggested that:(1) there is difference in recognition of different expression in ASD children. The recognition of happy and sad expression is better than that of fear and anger.(2) There is local processing in fear and anger recognition but not in happy and sad recognition.(3) The weakening of the global information and local information influence the expression recognition and visual scanning of ASD children, who showed typical feature of visual information searching during expression processing.