主催: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
It has been debated whether attending to a particular facial region, such as the eyes, is impaired in children with autism. The purpose of this study was to systematically test the poor eye gaze hypothesis postulating that children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA)/AS are impaired in their ability to attend to another’s eyes. A group with ASD (n = 14) and a paired non-ASD group (n = 19) completed three emotion judgment tasks requiring perception of expressed happiness, angry and fear respectively in a facial image masked by the “Bubbles”. Results indicated that similar to non-ASD individuals, ASD individuals used information from other people’s eyes to judge the emotion of happiness and angry. In contrast, ASD individuals failed to use the information to judge the fearful emotion from other people’s eyes compared to participants without autism. The results challenge the conventional hypothesis that individuals with ASD cannot attend to or derive information from another’s eyes, and the results suggest an asymmetric eye-gaze-ability or a selective impairment in extracting facial information expressed by different emotions in ASD.
