Human Face Recognition, Information Processing and Social Behavior in Children with Autism

Pascale Planche

UFR Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France.

DOI: 10.4236/psych.2014.511147                

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.

Keywords

Asperger’s Syndrome, High-Functioning Autism, Face Recognition, Information Processing, Social Impairment

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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