Experimental Studies On Processing Of Facial Expression In Children With Autism

Children with autism have disabilities in social communication. Facial expression identification is an important capability of social communication and thus be studied by many researchers. Among various studies on facial expression of children with autism, parts of them used cartoon facial expression as experimental materials to demonstrate that children with autism have the ability of configural processing as to testify the weak central coherence theory and theory of deficits in facial processing. And those studies gave theoretical foundations to further interventions. Hence a comparison between real facial expression identification and cartoon facial expression identification is meaningful both theoretically and practically.Basing on the facial processing theory, this study focused on such comparison. The participants of the study are made up of 9 children with autism and 11 nondisabled children from nursery and primary schools.There are three kinds of experimental materials:real facial expressions, cartoon facial expressions, and stick figure facial expressions.The eye tracker is also used as assessment instrument of this study. The results show that:(1)all participants showed preferences to real facial expressions and stick figure facial expressions.There are more first fixations and longer fixation duration on these two kinds of facial expressions; (2) children with autism had lower accuracy than nondisabled ones on all three kinds of facial expressions. And they had better performance on identification of real facial expressions and stick figure facial expressions and spent more time on fixating the eye of cartoon and stick figural faces; (3)both autistic and nondisabled children were influenced by covering effect. There were fewer fixations, shorter fixation duration and lower accuracy when nondisabled children fixate on cartoon facial expressions with covered eyes and same thing happened when they fixated on stick figure facial expressions with covered mouths. Moreover, there were fewer fixations, shorter fixation duration and lower accuracy when children with autism fixated on both real and stick figure facial expressions with covered mouths.However the performances of children with autism on identifying various facial expressions were not affected when the eyes were covered. (4) both autistic and nondisabled children were influenced by inversion effect. They had lower accuracy and shorter fixation duration on eyes.Nondisabled children had fewer fixations on both real and cartoon figure facial expressions.Children with autism had fewer fixations on both cartoon and stick figure facial expressions.After the discussions on these results, conclusions are:preferences on exogenous attention on both real and stick figure facial expressions have more influences on the identification of both autistic and nondisabled children than those on exogenous attention. Generally children with autism have a complete ability of configural processing on three kinds of facial expressions.They may use some special tactics and take the mouths as main clues when identifying real or stick figure faces. However, children with autism have a lower accuracy than nondisabled ones.