| Deficits in face processing have often been reported among individuals with autism, which have been suggested to account for the social difficulties observed in this population. However, the exact nature of the cognitive deficit subtending atypical face processing in autism remains unknown. One hypothesis is that individuals with autism have a deficit in processing configural face information, leading them to rely on local cues alone. An alternative hypothesis is that an enhancement of local processing is present, without any configural face processing deficit. Experiment 1 uses the face inversion effect in order to assess the integrity of configural face processing in individuals with autism. Typically, inversion affects face recognition to a greater degree than object recognition. It is generally agreed that face inversion specifically affects the processing of configural information. If configural processing is disrupted in persons with autism, they should not show the typical face inversion effect. An immediate, forced-choice face recognition task was administered to the participants in two orientation conditions (upright and inverted). The results showed that participants with autism displayed an inversion effect similar to that of control participants, suggesting that the configural processing of faces is intact in this disorder. In experiment 2, we used a priming paradigm that directly assessed both local and configural levels of face processing. The results showed that the priming effects obtained with two types of face segmentation were identical in the autistic and control groups, except that there was a greater priming effect for single face parts in the autistic group. The results of this study demonstrate that the configural processing of faces is intact in autism, but that individuals with this disorder have an enhanced processing of face parts.; This is the first empirical demonstration of a local bias in face processing in autism. These results are consistent with several studies in non-social domains showing an enhanced processing of local information in the visual and auditory domains. Thus, the face processing peculiarities observed in autism are most likely not linked to a socially-specific mechanism, but instead to a generally enhanced processing of the local aspects of social and non-social information. |
