TITLE:
Human Face Recognition, Information Processing and Social Behavior in Children with Autism
AUTHORS:
Pascale Planche
KEYWORDS:
Asperger’s Syndrome, High-Functioning Autism, Face Recognition, Information Processing, Social Impairment
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.11,
August
25,
2014
ABSTRACT:
The aim of this study was to investigate whether children with
high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger’s syndrome (AS) can be
differentiated from each other and from typically developing children in
ability to recognize a human face. The present study included 69 participants:
children with autism (high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome, n = 15
per group) and a control group of 39 typically developing children. It involved
a face recognition task included in the NEPSY scale. Results showed that the
autism groups performed poorer than the typically developing group, but no
difference was found between high-functioning and Asperger groups. Both the
information processing peculiarities of children with autism and their
(interactional and communicative) social impairments could explain their
difficulty to recognize human faces.