A major new study has uncovered important differences in how the brains of autistic children respond to human faces. Published in Nature Mental Health, the research is among the most extensive investigations yet into how face perception works in autism. Some autistic people tend to look at faces less frequently or make less eye contact.
They may also find it more difficult to remember faces or interpret facial expressions compared with neurotypical individuals. Scientists have spent decades investigating the brain activity behind these differences. In the early 2000s, for example, researchers at Yale reported that brain regions responsible for processing faces showed lower activity in autistic individuals than in people without autism.
James McPartland, PhD, Harris Professor in the Child Study Center and director of the Center for Brain and Mind Health, studies how autistic people process faces using electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that records the brain's electrical activity. Previous EEG studies, however, have typically examined signals from limited regions rather than analyzing activity across the entire scalp. To gain a more complete picture, McPartland and his colleagues conducted a study involving approximately 400 autistic children, examining electrical signals recorded across the scalp.
They discovered that brain activity associated with face recognition was less clearly distinguishable in autistic participants. They also identified a striking difference in development: In neurotypical children, the brain's response to faces became more specialized with age, while autistic children did not show the same pattern. "This is the first time we've leveraged the full volume of very rich information provided by an EEG recording to understand face perception and autism," McPartland says.
How Scientists Discovered Differences in Autistic Brain Activity McPartland compares traditional approaches to studying face recognition with attempting to understand traffic throughout an entire city by monitoring just one downtown street. "That's the way most research on face processing so far has worked," McPartland says. The new approach provides a much broader perspective, similar to observing traffic across an entire city using satellite imagery.
To investigate these patterns, the researchers analyzed information collected through the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT). The dataset included autistic and neurotypical children across different age groups. During the experiments, participants viewed pictures of faces and everyday objects while EEG equipment recorded their brain activity.
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