Facial recognition is impaired in autism

The developmental disorder autism interferes with social functioning—even with the recognition of faces, as a functional magnetic resonance imagery study now shows in detail. The study, which appeared in April in the Archives of General Psychiatry, was the work of a Yale research team headed by Robert T. Schultz, Ph.D., an associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center.

A decade of investigation has established that people with autism have more difficulty than unaffected individuals in recognizing faces. Instead, they rely on perceptual processes typically used to recognize non-face objects. The Yale study confirms these observations in terms of brain activity patterns. When a person with autism examines a face, his or her brain reacts differently from the brain of a normal person. Instead of bursting into activity at a site called the fusiform gyrus, which normally responds preferentially to faces, individuals with autism display increased activity in the inferior temporal gyrus, which normally responds most strongly to objects. In addition, people with autism tend to process faces by focusing on a few salient features rather than on the overall configuration, as if they were processing an object.

The new findings lead to a riddle. Could this abnormal brain activity be a cause of autism, or the result of a long-standing disinterest in social interactions that dates back to early childhood? “With our data, it is not possible to know,” says Schultz, but he and many of his fellow researchers look forward to finding out.